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RAW MATERIAL 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


THE SQUIRREL-CAGE 

A MONTESSORI MOTHER 
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN 
THE BENT TWIG 

THE REAL MOTIVE 


FELLOW CAPTAINS 
(With Saran N. CLEGHORN) 


UNDERSTOOD BETSY 
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE 
THE DAY OF GLORY 

THE BRIMMING CUP 
ROUGH-HEWN 


RAW MATERIAL 


BY 


DOROTHY CANFIELD 


AD 





NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 


PRINTED IN THE U.S. A. BY 


The Quinn & Woden Companp 


BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY 


CONTENTS 


Raw MatTeERIAL Ay © WSS ne irene’ crete ata 9 
UNCLE GILES . ; t : ‘ : : eee 1: 
“Wuat Gors Ur...” . . : i : as 
O_p MAN WARNER . j ; iy G0 
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FarrRFAX HUNTER . ‘ ; ; " ’ er SEE 
Pucemeoes TAU, MIEVER 2° =... as aes © 
Deen wee Gonos. 6. LAs 
Beem aMe CARVES. 9 6 51 
Se ee a a a OF 
CoLoNEL SHAYS.. Saari Ne ee ate os) 
A Great Love eats. 187 
Pere as Dewann 197 
UNCLE ELLIS. ; Pe att 
Gop’s CouUNTRY Peery ema vad es at SS poe SRS 
INHERITANCE .. : ’ g ; : a ee 
Tuirty YEARS AFTER. Pie 
“Tur OLp New ENGLAND sree? meee 
OcTOBER, 1918 . ee 
A Breton Amonc Hst Hsr . ; : ; {365 


ann ne Rpt aati 


ALMERA ere Catwierp. . . 273 


RAW MATERIAL 





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RAW MATERIAL 


I pon’t know who is responsible for this rather odd 
book, but I lay it to the earlier generations of my 
family. My clergyman grandfather always said 
that he never enjoyed any sermons so much as the 
ones he preached to himself sitting under another 
clergyman’s pulpit. When the text was given out, 
his mind seized on it with a vivid fresh interest and, 
running rapidly away from the intrusive sound of 
the other preacher’s voice, wove a tissue of clear, 
strong, and fascinatingly interesting reasonings and 
exhortations. Grandfather used to say that such 
sermons preached to himself were in the nature of 
things much better than any he could ever deliver 
in church. “I don’t have to keep a wary eye out 
for stupid old Mrs. Ellsworth, who never under- 
stands anything light or fanciful; I don’t have to 
remember to thunder occasionally at stolid Mr. 
Peters to wake him up. I don’t have to remember 
to keep my voice raised so that deaf old Senator 
Peaseley can hear me. I am not obliged to hold the 
wandering attention of their muddled heads by a 
series of foolish little rhetorical tricks or by a pro- 
9 


10 RAW MATERIAL 


digious effort of my personality. I can just make 
my sermon what it ought to be.” 

My father, who did a great deal of public speak- 
ing, though not in pulpits, took up this habit in his 
turn. When a speaker began an address, he always 
fell into a trance-like condition, his eyes fixed stead- 
ily on the other orator, apparently giving him the 
most profound attention, but in reality making in his 
mind, on the theme suggested by the audible 
speaker, a fluent, impassioned address of his own. 
He used to say that he came to himself after one of 
these auto-addresses infinitely exhilarated and re- 
freshed by the experience of having been speaking to 
an audience which instantly caught his every point, 
and which, although entirely sympathetic, was 
stimulatingly quick to find the weak spots in his 
argument and eager to keep him up to his best. 
Afterwards he dreaded an ordinary audience with 
its limping comprehension, its wandering attention, 
its ill-timed laughter and applause. 

After I began to read for myself I found the same 
habit of mind familiar to many authors. The 
Stevensons walked up and down the porch at Sara- 
nac, talking at the tops of their voices, on fire with 
enthusiasm for their first conception of “The 
Wrecker.” There never was, there never could be 


RAW MATERIAL Il 


(so they found out afterwards) a story half so fine 
as that tale seemed to them in those glorious mo- 
ments when they saw it as they would have liked to 
make it. I nodded my head understandingly over 
this episode. Yes, that was what, in their plain way, 
my grandfather and father had done. I recognized 
the process. It was evidently a universal one. And — 
when in “Cousine Bette’ I encountered Wencelas 
Steinbock, I recognized him from afar. ‘To muse, 
to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful 
occupation. The work then floats in all the grace of 
infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the 
fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juice 
of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.” 

And upon my own arrival in adult life it seemed 
quite the expected and natural thing to find my own 
fancy constantly occupied in this way. The stories 
I told myself were infinitely superior to anything I 
ever got down on paper. Just as my father had been 
the ideal audience for himself, so I was my own best 
reader, a reader who needed no long explanations, 
who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale 
all the experience which made it intelligible. Two 
words with the grocer’s boy, delivering soap and 
canned salmon at the back door, and I was off, 
author and reader galloping along side by side, on a 


12 RAW MATERIAL 


story which made not only my own written tales, but 
other people’s as well, seem clumsy, obvious, and 
wordy. A look on an old cousin’s face was to me— 
like a text to my grandfather—a springboard from 
which author and reader plunged simultaneously 
into the sea of human relationships, sensing in 
human life significances pitiful, exalted, profound, 
beyond anything that can be drawn out with the 
loose-meshed net of words. Did I sit idling in a 
railway station, my great-uncle, who died before 
I was born, stood there beside me, expounding his 
life to me with a precision, a daring abandon, a zest- 
ful ardor which would wither and fade if it were 
transferred to the pages of a book. 

At first I thought this habit of mind entirely uni- 
versal—as it is certainly the most natural one possi- 
ble; but in the course of much random talk about 
things in general, I have occasionally come across 
people whose eyes are too weak for the white bril- 
liance of reality, who can only see life through the 
printed page, which is a very opaque object. Such 
people—and they are often cultivated, university- 
bred—will say, quite as if they were uttering a tru- 
ism: “Of course characters in books—well-written 
books—are ever so much more interesting than men 
and women in real life.” 


RAW MATERIAL 13 


They perceive the fateful mixture of beast and 
angel in the human face only in a portrait gallery; 
for them the birds sing, the winds sigh, and human 
hearts cry out, only at a symphony concert; they 
depend on books to give them faintly, dully, dimly, 
at third-hand, what lies before them every day, 
bright-colored, throbbing, and alive. It is a mental 
attitude hard for me to understand but it does exist. 
I have seen them turn away from a stern and noble 
tragedy in the life of their washerwoman, to the 
cheap sentimentality of a poor novel, which guaran- 
tees (as a fake dentist promises to fill teeth without 
pain) to provide tears without emotion. I have seen 
women who might have been playing with a baby, 
laughing at his inimitable funniness, leave him to a 
nurse and go out to enliven their minds by the con- 
templation of custard-pies smeared over the human 
countenance. 

We are so used to this phenomenon that it does 
not seem strange to us. But it is strange—strange 
and tragic. And I do not in the least believe that 
the tragedy is one of the inevitable ones. I think 
it is simply a bad habit which has grown up as the 
modern world has taken to reading. 

Why did the habit ever start? Naturally enough. 
Because the new medium of cheap printing let loose 


14 RAW MATERIAL 


on the world the innate loquacity of writers, unre- 
pressed by the limitations of the human voice. 
Other people have not been able to hear themselves 
think since Gutenberg enabled writers to drown out 
the grave, silent, first-hand mental processes of 
people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The 
writer is not born (as is his boast) with more ca- 
pacity than other people for seeing color and interest 
and meaning in life; he is born merely with an ir- 
repressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and 
feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable 
capacity for speech into thinking that he is the only 
human being on whom life makes an impression. 
This is not so. He is merely so made that he can- 
not rest till he has told everybody who will listen to 
him, the impression that life has made on him. 
This is the queer mainspring of creative literature. 
The writer cannot keep a shut mouth. To speak 
out seems to be the only useful thing he can do in 
life. And in its way it is a very useful occupation. 
But there is no reason why other people who have 
other useful things to do should miss the purity and 
vividness of a first-hand impression of life which 
they could enjoy without spoiling it, as an artist al- 
ways does, by his instant anxiety about how much 
of it he can carry off with him for his art, by his in- 


RAW MATERIAL 15 


stant mental fumbling with technical means, by his 
anguished mental questions: ‘“‘What would be the 
best way to get that effect over in a book?” or ‘““How 
could you convey that impression in a dialogue?” 

It is a dog’s life, believe me, this absurd, preten- 
tious carrying about of your little literary yardstick 
and holding it up against the magnificent hugeness 
of the world. I cannot believe that it is necessary 
to have that yardstick in hand before seeing the 
hugeness which it can never measure. One proof 
that it is not necessary is the fact that artists enjoy 
the raw materials of arts which they do not practise, 
much more freely and light-heartedly than the raw 
material of their own. I love the materials from 
which painters make pictures and musicians make 
music vastly more than the materials from which 
novelists make novels, because I feel no responsibil- 
ity about them, because I know that they do not 
mean for me a struggle, foredoomed to failure, to 
get them down on canvas or between the five lines 
of the musical staff. 

Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which 
would put an end to the writing of novels alto- 
gether? Personally I do not believe that the foun- 
dations of the world would move by a hair if that 
end were brought about. But, as a matter of fact, I 


16 RAW MATERIAL 


do not in the least think that novel-writing would be 
anything but immensely benefited by a reading pub- 
lic which had acquired its own eyesight and did not 
depend on the writer’s. Such a body of creative- 
minded readers would lift the art of fiction up to 
levels we have none of us conceived. With such a 
public of trained, practised observers, fiction could 
cast off the encumbering paraphernalia of explana- 
tions and photographs which now weigh it down. 
There need be no fear for the future of fiction if 
every one takes to being his own novelist. For then 
readers will not look in novels for what is never 
there, reality itself. They will look for what is the 
only thing that ought to be there, the impression 
which reality has made on the writer, and they will 
have an impression of their own with which to com- 
pare that of the writer. This will free the author 
forever from attempting the impossible, bricks-with- 
out-straw undertaking of trying to get life itself be- 
tween the covers of a book. 

For never, never can fiction hope to attain myriads 
of effects which life effortlessly puts over wherever 
we look, if we will only see what is there. If we 
leave those inimitable natural effects of beauty, or 
fun, or tragedy, or farce entirely for the professional 
writer to see and enjoy and ponder on, we are show- 


RAW MATERIAL YW 


ing the same sort of passive, closed imaginations 
which lead Persians to sit obesely at ease on cush- 
ions, and watch professional dancers have all the 
fun of dancing. The phrase which we traditionally 
ascribe to them is this, “Why bother to dance your- 
selves, when you can hire somebody to do it much 
better?” But that is our own unspoken phrase 
about the raw material of art and its monopoly 
by the professional artist. We Westerners dance, 
ourselves, not because we have any notion that we 
can dance better than the professionals, but because 
we have discovered by experience that to dance gives 
us a very different sort of pleasure from that given 
by looking at professionals. We have also discov- 
ered that it does not at all prevent us from hiring 
professionals and enjoying them as much as any 
Persians. 

It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing 
their own thinking as well as watching the author 
do his, that I have put this volume together. When 
life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend 
to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. 
They practise the delight-giving art of being their 
own authors. They know the familiar, exquisite in- 
terest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw 
material which life constantly washes up to every 


18 RAW MATERIAL 


one in great flooding masses. And they do this for 
their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting by 
it in the eyes of the world. They work to create 
order out of chaos with a single-hearted effort, im- 
possible to poor authors, tortured by the aching 
need to get the results of their efforts into words in- 
telligible to others. 

Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite 
permissible for them to indulge in what was perni- 
cious self-indulgence for an artist like Wencelas 
Steinbock. They are good children who, having 
nourished themselves on the substantial food of use- 
ful work, may eat candy without risking indigestion. 
The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt to trans- 
form the wonder of life into art! Those other dis- 
interested observers of life, those wise, deeply pon- 
dering, far-seeing men and women, driven by their 
own need to make something understandable out of 
our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to 
piece together what they see into intelligible order. 
But they do this in their own hearts, for their own 
satisfaction. How singularly free-handed and open- 
hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared 
to the artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to 
say avaricious, anxiety to utilize every scrap of his 
life as raw material for his art. 


RAW MATERIAL 19 


Such people have, as the reward for their disin- 
terested attitude of mind, all the pleasures of the 
creative artist’s life and none of its terrible pains. 
All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one of 
seeing themselves in print. This is—for me at least 
—a, pleasure deeply colored with humiliation. The 
stuff which I manage to get into a printed book is 
so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the vi- 
brating, ordered, succulent life which goes on in- 
side my head before I put pen to paper! For my 
part, I envy the clever, happy people who are con- 
tent to let it stay in their heads, and never try to 
decant it into a book, only to find that the bouquet 
and aroma are all gone. I quite sympathize with 
them when they are impatient with the verbose 
literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of 
fiction spread out clumsily over two pages that which 
takes but a flash to think or to feel. They think, 
and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out 
in the inaccurate, halting system we call language, 
bears little relation to the arrow-swift movements 
of the thinking mind and feeling heart. 

That which is written down in an attempt to make 
it intelligible to everybody is a rude approximation 
like that of ready-made clothing, manufactured to 
fit every one somewhat and no one exactly. That 


20 RAW MATERIAL 


which springs into being in the brain at a contact 
with life, exactly fits the comprehension, back- 
ground, and experience of the person who owns the 
brain. There are no waste motions, no paragraphs 
to skip, no compressions too bare, no descriptions 
too wordy, none of those sore, never-solved prob- 
lems of the writer who addresses unknown readers, 
“How much can I leave out? How far can I sug- 
gest and not state? How far can I trust the read- 
er’s attention not to flag, his intelligence to under- 
stand at a hint, rather than at a statement? What 
experience of life can I presuppose him to have 
hade”’ 

When you are your own author, you know all 
about your reader, and need never think of his 
limitations. He is faithful to you, flies lightly when 
you rise into the air, plods steadily beside you at 
your own pace as you slowly work your way into 
unfamiliar country, flashes back into the past and 
selects exactly what is needed from his experience, 
sinks with you into a golden haze of contemplation 
over some surprising or puzzling phenomenon, is in 
no nagging hurry to “get on with the story.” After 
some experience of such a marriage of author and 
reader, don’t you find it hard to put up with the 
fumbling guesswork of a printed book? 


RAW MATERIAL 21 


And yet here I have written another book? No, 
this is not a written book in the usual sense. It is a 
book where nearly everything is left for the reader 
to do. I have only set down in it, just as if I were 
noting them down for my own use, a score of in- 
stances out of human life, which have long served 
me as pegs on which to hang the meditations of 
many different moods. 

Note well that I have not set down those medita- 
tions . . . or at most—for the flesh is weak!—only 
here and there a trace of them. But if I have occa- 
sionally back-slid from the strait neutral path of 
sacred Objectivity, at least let me here and now 
warn you to ignore whatever moralizings of mine 
have escaped excision. Pay no attention to them, if 
you run across one or two. I know for a certainty 
that my musings about the men and women who 
were the originals of these portraits would not serve 
you as they do me. I know you can make for your- 
selves infinitely better ones. I know that what you 
will do for yourselves will be like the living lace- 
work of many-colored sea-weed floating free and 
quivering in quiet sunlit pools; and that what I 
could get down in a book would be a poor little 
faded collection of stiff dead tendrils, pasted on blot- 
ting paper. 


22 RAW MATERIAL 


In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, 
I give you just the sort of thing from which a 
novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or 
episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the 
novels you are writing inside your own heads, be- 
fore I have spoiled them by the additions, cuttings, 
stretchings, or twistings necessary to make them fit 
into the fabric of a book. I give them to you, 
rounded and whole, just as they happened, without 
filing and smoothing truth down to the limits of pos- 
sibility as all fiction-writers are forced to do. I 
spare you all the long-winded conventional devices, 
descriptions, transitions, exposition, eloquent pas- 
sages and the like, by which writers try to divert 
the minds of their readers from the inherent im- 
probability of their stories, devices which, to the 
suspicious mind, resemble the patter of thimblerig- 
gers at a county fair. You know as well as I how 
inherently improbable life is. Why pretend that it 
is not? I have treated you just as though you were 
that other self in me who is my best reader. I have 
given you the fare I like best. 

And I have faith to believe that you will enjoy 
for once being able to move about in a book without 
a clutter of explanations and sign-boards to show 
you the road the author wishes you to take. I do 


RAW MATERIAL 23 


not wish you to take any road in particular, and 
rather hope you will try a good many different ones, 
as I do. I have only tried to loan you a little more 
to add to the raw material which life has brought 
you, out of which you are constructing your own at- 
tempt to understand. 

I am only handing you from my shelves a few 
more curiosities to set among the oddities you have 
already collected, and which from time to time you 
take down as I do mine, turning them around in 
your hands, poring over them with a smile, or a 
somber gaze, or a puzzled look of surprise. 





UNCLE GILES 


THERE are few personalities which survive the 
blurring, dimming results of being the subject of 
family talk through several generations; but the 
personality of my Great-Uncle Giles has suffered 
no partial obliteration. It has come down to us 
with outlines keen and sharply etched into the family 
consciousness by the acid of exact recollection. 

This is not at all because Uncle Giles ever dis- 
graced the family or did any evil or wicked action. 
Quite the contrary! Uncle Giles thought that he 
was the only member of the entire tribe with any 
fineness or distinction of feeling, with any fitness 
for a higher sphere of activities than the grubby 
middle-class world of his kinsmen. Yes, that 1s 
what Uncle Giles thought, probably adding to him- 
self that he often felt that he was a “gentleman 
among canaille.” To this day the family bristles 
rise at the mention of any one who openly professes 
to be a gentleman. 

A gentleman should not be forced to the menial 
task of earning his living. Uncle Giles was never 
forced to the menial task of earning his living. 

25 


26 RAW MATERIAL 


None of the coarsely materialistic forces in human 
life ever succeeded in forcing him to it, not even 
the combined and violent efforts of a good many 
able-bodied and energetic kinspeople. The tales of 
how Uncle Giles blandly outwitted their stub- 
fingered attacks on his liberty and succeeded to the 
end of a very long life in living without work are 
endless in number and infinite in variety; and for 
three generations now have wrought the members 
of our family to wrath and laughter. He was in- 
credible. You can’t imagine anything like him. 
Unless you have had him in your family too. 

For many years Uncle Giles was “preparing for 
the ministry.” These were the candid years when 
his people did not know him so well as later, and 
still believed that with a little more help Giles 
would be able to get on his feet. He was a great 
favorite in the Theological Seminary. where he was 
a student for so long, a handsome well-set-up blond 
young man, with beautiful large blue eyes. I know 
just how he looked, for we have an expensive minia- 
ture of him that was painted at the time. He paid 
for that miniature with the money my great-grand- 
father pried out of a Vermont farm. It had been 
sent to pay for his board. You can’t abandon a son 
just on the point of becoming a clergyman and being 


UNCLE GILES 27 


a credit to the entire family. Great-grandfather 
himself had no more money to send at that time, 
but his other sons, hard-working, energetic, success- 
ful men, clubbed together and made up the amount 
necessary to settle that board-bill. Uncle Giles 
thanked them and forwarded with his letter, to 
show them, in his own phrase, “that their bounty 
was not ill-advised,” a beautifully bound, high- 
priced, little red morocco note-book in which 
he had written down the flattering things said of 
him by his professors and others—especially others. 
He underlined certain passages, thus: “. . . a very 
worthy young man, most pleasing in society.” “A 
model to all im the decorum and grace of his man- 
ners.” 

His board bill had to be paid a good many times 
before Uncle Giles finally gave up preparing him- 
self for the ministry. The summer vacations of 
this period he spent in visiting first one and then an- 
other member of the family, a first-rate ornament 
on the front porch and at the table, admired by the 
ladies of the neighborhood, a prime favorite on 
picnics and on the croquet ground. He always 
seemed to have dropped from a higher world into 
the rough middle-class existence of his kin, but his 
courtesy was so exquisite that he refrained from 


28 RAW MATERIAL 


commenting on this in any way. Still you could see 
that he felt it. Especially if you were one of the 
well-to-do neighbors on whom the distinguished 
young theological student paid evening calls, you 
admired his quiet tact and his steady loyalty to his 
commonplace family. 

The effect which his quiet tact and steady loyalty 
had on his commonplace family was so great that 
it has persisted undiminished to this day. Any one 
of us, to the remotest cousin, can spot an Uncle 
Giles as far as we can see him. We know all about 
him, and it is not on our front porches that he comes 
to display his tact and loyalty, and the decorum and 
grace of his manners. As for allowing the faintest 
trace of Uncle-Gilesism to color our own lives, 
there is not one of us who would not rush out to earn 
his living by breaking stone by the road-side rather 
than accept even the most genuinely voluntary loan. 
We are, as Uncle Giles felt, a very commonplace 
family, of the most ordinary Anglo-Saxon stock, 
with no illuminating vein of imaginative Irish or 
Scotch or Welsh blood; and I think it very likely 
that if we had not experienced Uncle Giles we would 
have been the stodgiest of the stodgy as far as so- 
cial injustice is concerned. But our imaginations 
seem to have been torn open by Uncle Giles as by 


UNCLE GILES 29 


a charge of dynamite; and, having once understood 
what he meant, we hang to that comprehension with 
all our dull Anglo-Saxon tenacity. We have a deep, 
unfailing sympathy with any one who is trying to 
secure a better and fairer adjustment of burdens in 
human life, because we see in our plain dull way 
that what he is trying to do is to eliminate the Uncle 
Gileses from society and force them to work. And 
we are always uneasily trying to make sure that we 
are not in the bigger scheme, without realizing it, 
Uncle Gilesing it ourselves. 

After a while Uncle Giles stopped preparing for 
the ministry and became an invalid. He bore this 
affliction with the unaffected manly courage which 
was always one of his marked characteristics. He 
never complained: he “‘bore up” in all circumstances; 
even on busy wash-days when there was no time to 
prepare one of the dainty little dishes which the 
delicacy of his taste enabled him so greatly to ap- 
preciate. Uncle Giles always said of the rude, vig- 
orous, hearty, undiscriminating men of the family, 
that they could “eat anything.” His accent in say- 
ing this was the wistful one of resigned envy of 
their health. 

It has been a point of honor with us all, ever 
since, to be able to “eat anything.” Any one, even a 


30 RAW MATERIAL 


legitimate invalid, who is inclined to be fastidious 
and make it difficult for the others, feels a united 
family glare concentrating on him, which makes him, 
in a panic, reach out eagerly for the boiled pork and 
cabbage. 

Uncle Giles’s was a singular case, “one of those 
mysterious maladies which baffle even the wisest 
physicians,” as he used to say himself. A good 
many ladies in those days had mysterious maladies 
which baffled even the wisest physicians, and they 
used to enjoy Uncle Giles above everything. No 
other man had such an understanding of their symp- 
toms and such sympathy for their sufferings. The 
easy chair beside Uncle Giles’s invalid couch was 
seldom vacant. Ladies going away after having left 
a vaseful of flowers for him, and a plateful of 
cake, and two or three jars of jelly, and some cold 
breasts of chicken, would say with shining, exalted 
countenances, “In spite of his terrible trials, what 
an inspiration our friend can be! An hour with that 
good man is like an hour on Pisgah.” 

They would, as like as not, make such a remark 
to the brave invalid’s brother or cousin (or, in later 
years, nephew) who was earning the money to keep 
the household going. I am afraid we are no longer 
as a family very sure what or where Pisgah is, al- 


UNCLE GILES 31 


though we know it is in the Bible somewhere, but 
there is a fierce family tradition against fussing 
over your health which is as vivid this minute as on 
the day when the brother or cousin or nephew of 
Uncle Giles turned away with discourteous haste 
from the shining-faced lady and stamped rudely 
into another room. Doctors enter our homes for a 
broken leg or for a confinement, but seldom for any- 
thing else. 

When the Civil War came on, and Uncle Giles 
‘was the only man in the family left at home, he rose 
splendidly to the occasion and devoted himself to 
the instruction of his kinswomen, ignorant of the 
technique of warfare. From his invalid couch he ex- 
plained to them the strategy of the great battles in 
which their brothers and husbands and fathers were 
fighting; and when the letters from hospital came 
with news of the wounded, who but Uncle Giles was 
competent to understand and explain the symptoms 
reported. As a rule the women of his family were 
too frantically busy with their Martha-like concen- 
tration on the mere material problems of wartime 
life to give these lucid and intellectual discussions 
of strategy the attention and consideration they de- 
served. The war, however, though it seemed end- 
less, lasted after all but four years. And when it 


32 RAW MATERIAL 


was over, Uncle Giles was free to go back to discus- 
sions more congenial to his literary and esthetic 
tastes. 

By this time he was past middle-age, “a butterfly 
broken on the wheel of life,” as he said; it was of 
course out of the question to expect him to think 
of earning his own living. He had become a family 
tradition by that time, too, firmly embedded in the 
solidly set cement of family habits. The older gen- 
eration always had taken care of him, the younger 
saw no way out, and with an unsurprised resigna- 
tion bent their shoulders to carry on. So, before 
any other plans could be made, Uncle Giles had to 
be thought of. Vacations were taken seriatim not 
to leave Uncle Giles alone. In buying or building a 
house, care had to be taken to have a room suitable 
for Uncle Giles when it was your turn to entertain 
him. If the children had measles, one of the first 
things to do was to get Uncle Giles into some other 
home so that he would not be quarantined. That 
strange law of family life which ordains that the 
person most difficult to please is always, in the long 
run, the one to please whom most efforts are made, 
worked out in its usual complete detail. The dishes 
Uncle Giles liked were the only ones served (since 
other men could “eat anything”); the songs Uncle 


UNCLE GILES 33 


Giles liked were the only ones sung; the houses were 
adjusted to him; the very color of the rugs and the 
pictures on the walls were selected to suit Uncle 
Giles’s fine and exacting taste. 

Looking back, through the perspective of a gen- 
eration-and-a-half, I can see the exact point of safely 
acknowledged middle-age when Uncle Giles’s health 
began cautiously to improve; but it must have been 
imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was 
the change. His kin grew used to each successive 
stage of his recovery before they realized it was 
there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to 
have Uncle Giles pass into a remarkably hale and 
vigorous old age. 

“Invalids often are strong in their later years,” 
he said of himself. “It is God’s compensation for 
their earlier sufferings.” 

He passed into the full rewards of the most re- 
_ warded old age. It was a period of apotheosis for 
him, and a very lengthy one at that, for he lived to 
be well past eighty. In any gathering Uncle Giles, 
erect and handsome, specklessly attired, his smooth 
old face neatly shaved, with a quaint, gentle, old- 
world courtesy and protecting chivalry in his man- 
ner to ladies, was a conspicuous and much-admired 
figure. People brought their visitors to call on him, 


34 RAW MATERIAL 


and to hear him tell in his vivid, animated way of 
old times in the country. His great specialty was 
the Civil War. At any gathering where veterans of 
the War were to be honored, Uncle Giles held every 
one breathless with his descriptions of Gettysburg 
and Chancellorsville; and when he spoke of Mobile 
Bay and Sherman’s march, how his voice pealed, 
how his fine eyes lighted up! Strangers used to say 
to themselves that it was easy to see what an elo- 
quent preacher he must have been when he was in 
the active ministry. The glum old men in worn blue 
coats used to gather in a knot in the farthest corner, 
and in low tones, not to interrupt his discourse, 
would chat to each other of crops, fishing, and poli- 
tics. 

Somewhere we have a scrapbook in which an 
ironic cousin of mine carefully pasted in all the 
newspaper articles that were written about Uncle 
Giles in his old age, and the many handsome obitu- 
ary notices which appeared when he finally died. I 
can remember my father’s getting it out occasionally, 
and reading the clippings to himself with a very 
grim expression on his face; but it always moved 
my light-hearted, fun-loving mother to peals of 
laughter. After all, she was related to Uncle Giles 
only by marriage and felt no responsibility for him. 


UNCLE GILES 35 


The other day, in looking over some old legal 
papers, I came across a yellowed letter, folded and 
sealed (as was the habit before envelopes were com- 
mon) with three handsome pale-blue seals on its 
back. The seals were made with the crested cameo 
ring which Uncle Giles always wore, bearing what 
he insisted was the “coat of arms” of our family. 
The handwriting of the letter was beautiful, formed 
with an amorous pride in every letter. It was 
from Uncle Giles to one of his uncles, my great- 
grandfather’s brother. It had lain there lost for 
half a century or more, and of course I had never 
seen it before; but every word of it was familiar to 
me as I glanced it over. It began in a manner char- 
acteristic of Uncle Giles’s polished courtesy, with 
inquiries after every member of his uncle’s family, 
and a pleasant word for each one. He then detailed 
the state of his health, which, alas, left much to be 
desired, and seemed, so the doctors told him, to re- 
quire urgently a summer in the mountains. Leav- 
ing this subject, he jumped to the local news of the 
town where he was then living, and told one or two 
amusing stories. In one of them I remember was 
this phrase, “I told her I might be poor, but that a 
gentleman of good birth did not recognize poverty 
as a member of the family.” Through a neat transi- 


36 RAW MATERIAL 


tion after this he led up again to the subject of his 
health and to the desirability of his passing some 
months in the mountains, “in the pure air of God’s 
great hills.” Then he entered upon a discreet, 
pleasant, whimsical reference to the fact that only a 
contribution from his uncle’s purse could make this 
possible. There never was anybody who could 
beat Uncle Giles on ease and grace, and pleasant, 
pungent humor when it came to asking for money. 
The only person embarrassed in that situation was 
the one of whom Uncle Giles was expecting the loan. 

I read no more. With no conscious volition of 
mine, my hand had scrunched the letter into a ball, 
and my arm, without my bidding, had hurled the ball 
into the heart of the fire. 


But as I reflected on the subject afterwards, and 
thought of the influence which Uncle Giles has al- 
ways had on our family, it occurred to me that I 
was wrong. Uncle Giles ought not to be forgotten. 
I ought to have saved that letter to show to my 
children. 


Writ GOES UP .. .” 


Amonc the many agreeably arranged European 
lives which were roughly interrupted by the war, I 
know of none more snugly and compactly comforta- 
ble than that of Octavie Moreau. Indeed, for some 
years there had been in the back of my mind a faint 
notion of something almost indiscreet in the admira- 
bly competent way in which ’Tavie arranged her 
life precisely to her taste. I don’t mean that it was 
an easeful or elegant or self-indulgent life. She 
cared as little for dress as any other inteilectual 
Frenchwoman, let herself get portly, did up her hair 
queerly, and the rigorously hearth-and-home matrons 
of Tourciennes pointed her out to their young 
daughters as a horrible example of what happens to 
the looks of a woman who acquires too much learn- 
ing. As for ease and self-indulgence, ’Tavie’s vig- 
orous personality and powerful, disciplined brain, 
as well as the need to earn her living, kept her from 
laying on intellectual fat. But all that vigorous 
personality, that powerful brain, as well as all the 
money which she competently earned, seemed more 
and more to be concentrated on her own comfort and 
of 


38 RAW MATERIAL 


on nothing else. Her excellent salary as professor 
of science in the girls’ Lycée was almost doubled by 
what she made by private lessons, for she was an 
inspired natural teacher, who can, as the saying 
goes, teach anybody anything. In the thirty years 
of her life in Tourciennes she has pulled innumera- 
ble despairing boys and girls through dreaded exam- 
inations in science and mathematics; and parents 
pay well, the world over, for having their boys and 
girls pulled through examinations. ‘They respect 
the woman who can do it, even if, as in Octavie’s 
case, their respect is tempered with considerable 
disapprobation of eccentric dress, irreligious ideas, 
immense skepticism, and cigarette-smoking. And 
in this case the respect was heightened by Mlle. 
Moreau’s well-known ability to drive a hard bargain 
and to see through any one’s else attempt to do the 
same. Octavie had plenty of everything, brains, 
will-power and money; but as far as I could see, she 
never did anything with this plenty, except to 
feather her own nest. I mean this quite literally, 
for *Tavie had a nest, a pretty, red-roofed, gray- 
walled, old villa, in the outskirts of Tourciennes, 
which she had bought years before at a great bar- 
gain, and which was the center of her life. Her 
younger sister, a weaker edition of Octavie, who 


pyre FP OGORS URS...” 39 


lived with her, and kept house for her, and revolved 
about her, and adored her, and depended on her, 
joined with her in this, as in everything else. Those 
two women visibly existed for the purpose of bring- 
ing to perfection that house and the fine, walled 
garden about it. Long before anybody else in our 
circle in France thought of such a thing as having 
a real bathroom with hot and cold water, "Tavie had 
one, tiled, and glazed, and gleaming. Octavie’s li- 
brary was the best one (in science and economic 
history) in that part of France. Never were there 
such perfectly laid and kept floors as ’Tavie’s, nor 
such a kitchen garden, nor closets so convenient and 
ingeniously arranged, nor a kitchen of such perfec- 
tion. All well-to-do kitchens in the north of France 
are works of art, but ’Iavie’s was several degrees 
more shining and copper-kettled and red-tiled and 
polished than any other, just as the food which was 
prepared there was several degrees more succulent, 
even than the superexcellent meals served elsewhere 
in that affluent industrial city of the North. As I 
finished one of *Tavie’s wonderful dinners, and 
stepped with her into the ordered marvel of her 
great garden, I remember one day having on the tip 
of my tongue some half-baked remark about how 
far the same amount of intelligence and energy 


40 RAW MATERIAL 


would have gone towards providing more decent 
homes for a few of the poor in her quarter—for the 
housing of the poor in Tourciennes was notorious 
for its wretchedness. But you may be sure I said 
nothing of the sort. Nobody ventured to make any 
such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie 
Moreau, fifty-four years old, weighty, powerful, ut- 
terly indifferent to other people’s opinions, her fine 
mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well- 
tempered personality like a splendid tool at the 
service of her will, her heart preserved from care 
about other people’s troubles by her biological con- 
viction of the futility of trying to help any one not 
energetic enough to help himself. She was not un- 
kind to people she happened to know personally, oc- 
casionally spilling over on the needy ones a little of 
her superabundant vigor, and some of the money 
she earned so easily. But in her heart she scorned 
people who were either materially or morally needy, 
as she scorned every one who was weak and ignorant 
and timorous, who was not strong enough to walk 
straight up to what he wanted and take it. She had 
always done that. Anybody who couldn't... ! 


Then the war began and well-planned lives be- 
came like grains of dust in a whirlwind. Tour- 


owWHAT GOES UP :. .” 4I 


ciennes was at once taken by the Germans and held 
until the very last of the war, and for more than 
four years none of the rest of us had a word from 
*Tavie and her sister. Beyond the trenches Tour- 
ciennes seemed more remote than the palest asteroid. 

But after the armistice, what with letters and 
visits, we soon learned all about their life under the 
German occupation, in most ways like the lives of 
all our other friends in the North, the grinding round 
of petty and great vexations and extortions and 
oppressions, and slow, dirty starvation of body, 
mind, and soul which has been described so many 
times since Armistice Day—but with one notable 
exception. To Octavie life had brought something 
more than this. 

Early in the third year of the war, the grimly en- 
during town was appalled by a decree, issued from 
German Headquarters. In reprisal for something 
said to have happened in far-away Alsace-Lorraine, 
forty of the leading women of Tourciennes were to 
be taken as hostages, conveyed to a prison-camp in 
the north of Germany, and left there indefinitely till 
the grievance (whatever it was) in Alsace-Lorraine 
had been adjusted to the satisfaction of the German 
government. 

By the third year of the war, every one in Tour- 


42 RAW MATERIAL 


ciennes knew very well what deportation to a Ger- 
man prison-camp meant: almost sure death, and 
certainly broken health for the most vigorous men. 
They had all at one time or another gone to the 
railway station to meet returned prisoners, ragged, 
demoralized groups of broken, tubercular skeletons, 
who had gone away from home elderly but power- 
ful men, leaders in their professions. And these 
latest hostages were to be women, delicately reared, 
not in their first youth, many of them already half- 
ill after three years of war privations. In order to 
make the deepest possible impression on the public 
of the captive city the most respected and conspicu- 
ous women were chosen, prominent either for their 
husband’s standing and wealth or for the place they 
had made for themselves, by their own intelligence 
and energy: the Directress of the Hospital, a well 
known teacher of music, the Mayor’s wife, the 
daughter of a noted professor. Of course, our Oc- 
tavie was among the number. 

We knew some of the others, too, either by repu- 
tation or personally, and could imagine the heart- 
sick horror in which their families saw them make 
their few hasty preparations for departure. Here is 
a typical case. One of the names on the list was 
that of Mme. Orléanne, a woman of seventy. She 


ayia GOERS UPT. .” 43 


was then so weak from malassimilation of war-food 
that she had not been out of doors for months! It 
was nothing less than a death-sentence for her. Her 
family did not even let her see the list. Her elder 
daughter, married to a wealthy manufacturer, went 
to the German officials and offered herself to be de- 
ported as a substitute, although she had two chil- 
dren, a girl of eight and a little boy of three! She 
was accepted, and, death in her heart, set about 
making up the tiny bundle of necessaries—all they 
were allowed to carry. Her little girl was old 
enough to take up the tradition of tragic stoicism 
of her elders and listened with a blanched face to 
the instructions of her desperate mother, who told 
her that there was now nothing but dignity left to 
Frenchwomen. When the German guard came to 
tell Mme. Baudoin that the truck which was to carry 
the hostages away to the railroad was waiting at the 
door, little Elise, rigid and gray, kissed her mother 
good-by silently, though after the truck had gone, 
she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. But 
Raoul, only a baby, screamed, and struck at the 
German soldier, clung wildly to his mother with 
hysteric strength, and after she had gone, broke 
away from his aunt, rushed out of the street door, 
shrieking, “Mother, Mother! don’t go away from 


44 RAW MATERIAL 


Raoul!” and flung himself frantically upon his 
mother’s skirts. She said to me, as she told me of 
this, “dying will be easy compared to that moment!” 
But without weakening she did the intolerable 
thing, the only thing there was to do, she reached 
down, tore the little boy’s tense fingers from her 
dress, and climbed up into the truck. “As I looked 
away from Raoul I saw that tears were running 
down the cheeks of the German guard who stood at 
the back of the truck.” 


Ah, this human race we belong to! 


Shuddering with the anguish of such scenes of 
separation, the hostages were locked for three days 
into cattle-cars, cold, windowless, jolting prisons, 
where they lived over and over those unbearable last 
moments with children, or sisters, or parents, or 
husbands, whom they never expected to see again. 
At the end of this ordeal, the wretched women, 
numb, half-starved, limping along in their disordered 
garments, raging inwardly, inflamed with indignant 
hatred for the soldiers who marshaled them, were 
brought together in their prison and left alone, save 
for two bored guards who sat at the door and stared 
at them. 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 45 


The prison camp was an enormous one in the 
north of Germany, a dreary clutter of rough wooden 
buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy plain, en- 
tangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire 
fencing. The prison-room allotted to the forty 
women from Tourciennes was a high, bare loft, like 
a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed barn. 
Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with 
damp, moldy straw, a couple of dirty . blankets 
on each. In the middle of the room was a smallish 
stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole 
in the top, closed by a flat lid. An iron kettle stood 
on the stove. Windows were set in one wall of the 
room. Under the windows ran a long bench, and 
before it stood a long table made of a wide board. 
There was nothing else to be seen, except grease 
and caked filth on the rough, unpainted boards of 
the floor and walls. The last of the women stag- 
gered into the room; the door was shut, and they 
faced each other in the gray winter light which fil- 
tered in through the smeared panes of the windows. 

All during the black nightmare of the journey, 
every one of them had been quivering with sup- 
pressed anguish. Absorbed each in her own grief 
and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw 
on the floor of the freight car, at the end of their 


46 RAW MATERIAL 


strength, undone by the ignominy of their utter de- 
fenselessness before brute force. ‘The marks of 
tears showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they 
had no more tears to shed now. They leaned 
against the walls and the bunks, their knees shaking 
with exhaustion, and looked about them at the 
dreary, dirty desolation of the room which from now 
on was to be their world. The guards stared at 
them indifferently, seeing nothing of any interest in 
that group of prisoners more than in any other, 
especially as these were women no longer young, 
disheveled, wrinkled, unappetizing, with uncombed, 
gray hair, and grimy hands. 

A little stir among them, and there was Octavie, 
our ’Tavie, on her feet, haggard with fatigue, dowdy, 
crumpled, battered, but powerful and magnetic. She 
was speaking to them, speaking with the authority 
of her long years of directing others, with the weight 
and assurance of her puissant personality. 

I can tell you almost exactly what she said, for 
the woman who were there and who told me about it 
afterwards, had apparently not forgotten a word! 
She began by saying clearly and energetically, like 
an older sister, ‘“Come, come, we are all French- 
women, and so we have courage; and we all have 
brains. People with brains and courage have noth- 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 47 


ing to fear anywhere, if they'll use them. Now let’s 
get to work and use ours, all for one and one for 
all!” 

Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her 
masterful gesture, brought them out of their lassi- 
tude, brought them from all sides and corners of the 
room, where they had abandoned themselves, 
brought them in a compact group close about her. 
She went on, her steady eyes going from one to the 
other, “I think I know what is the first thing to do; 
to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. 
You know it is said that women always quarrel 
among themselves, and that all French people do. 
We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, 
at all: if we are divided, we are undone. We're of 
all sorts, Catholics, free-thinkers, aristocrats, radi- 
cals, housekeepers, business-women, and we don’t 
know each other very well. But we are all women, 
civilized women, Frenchwomen, sisters! Nobody 
can help us but ourselves. But if we give 
all we have, they can never conquer us!” 

She stopped and looked at them deeply, her 
strong, ugly face, white with intensity. “A vow, my 
friends, a vow from every one of us, by what she 
holds most sacred, that she will summon all her 
strength to give of her very best for the common 


48 RAW MATERIAL 


good. In the name of our love for those we have 
left—” her voice broke, and she could not go on. 
She lifted her hand silently and held it up, her eyes 
fixed on them. The other hands went up, the drawn 
faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered each 
on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for 
others. The very air in the barrack-room seemed 
less stifling. The two German guards looked on, 
astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. 
These scattered, half-dead women, flung into the 
room like cattle, who had not seemed to know each 
other, all at once to be one unit! 

Octavie drew a long breath. Then, homely, fa- 
miliar, coherent as though she were giving a pre- 
liminary explanation to a class at the beginning of 
a school-year, ‘Now let us understand clearly what 
is happening to us, so that we can defend ourselves 
against it. What is it that is being done to us? An 
attempt is being made to break us down, physically 
and. morally. But these people around us here are 
not the ones who wish this; they are not as intelli- 
gent as we; and they haven’t half the personal 
incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent 
it. We have a thousand resources of ingenuity that 
they can’t touch at all. 

“We must begin by economizing every atom pos- 


“WHAT GOES UP .. .” 49 


sible of our strength, moral and physical. And we 
can start on that right now by not wasting any more 
strength hating our guards as we have all been 
hating the Germans who have had to touch us, so 
far. We can think of them as demons and infernal 
forces of evil and make them into horrors that will 
shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight 
at them to see what they are, and disregard them, 
just leave them out of our moral lives, when we see 
that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse 
and common men, and now forced to be abnormal, 
forced by others into a situation that develops every 
germ of brutality in them.” 

At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told 
of the German guard who had wept when her little 
boy was dragged away; and, “I’d rather be in my 
shoes than his,” cried Octavie vigorously. 

“So then we sweep them out of our world,” she 
went on, “and that leaves the decks cleared for real 
action. I should say,” she went on with a change of 
manner, including in one wide humorous glance her 
own dirty hands, the tangled hair of the others, and 
the grease and grime of the room, “that the next 
thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It’s 
plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let’s draw 
lots to see who begins, and the others can lie down 


50 RAW MATERIAL 


while they wait. Is there anybody here who speaks 
German enough to ask for soap and water? I see 
the broom here at hand.” <A good many of the 
women proved to have studied German at school, 
and three of them spoke it. But this did not carry 
them far. The guards laughed at the idea of soap— 
nobody in Germany had had soap for months— 
prisoners were not given such luxuries as towels, 
and as for water, the tap was down the hall, and the 
pail was there, and they could carry it for them- 
selves. Besides there was water in the kettle on 
the stove. 

There and then they began their campaign. Lots 
were drawn, a certain number of tired women col- 
lapsed into the bunks to wait, while Octavie organ- 
ized the others into squads, some to carry water; 
some to arrange a bathing-place in a corner of the 
room by hanging up their cloaks on strings stretched 
from nails; some to sweep out the worst of the dusty 
litter on the floor. 

There was order and purpose in the air. The 
first woman who emerged from behind the curtain 
of cloaks, bathed, fresh linen next her clean skin 
(for they had been allowed to bring one change of 
linen in their little packages), her hair in order, was 
like a being from another world, the world they had 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 51 


left. Self-respect came back to the others, as they 
looked at her. 

By night every woman was clean, had arranged 
her small belongings in her own bunk, and had 
washed out and hung up the body-linen which she 
had worn on the trip. One empty bunk had been 
set aside as the pharmacy, and all their little stock 
of medicine gathered there; another was the library, 
where a half-dozen books stood side by side; and a 
third was the storeroom for miscellaneous goods, 
the extra bars of soap they had brought from home, 
a little chocolate, thread, needles, scissors, and the 
like, communistically put together to be used for 
whatever proved to be the greatest need. They had 
taken stock of their material resources and agreed 
to share them. They had eaten what they could of 
the coarse, unpalatable food brought to them in the 
evening, and now sat on the long bench and on the 
floor, trying to plan out the struggle before them, 
the struggle to construct an endurable life out of the 
materials at hand. Octavie was saying, ‘Every- 
thing in order! ‘That is the French way to go at 
things; classify them and take them up one by one. 
What are we? Bodies and minds; both equally in 
danger. Now, the body first. We must have exer- 
cise out of doors, more than we’re used to at home, if 


52 RAW MATERIAL 


we are to digest this awful food. They say we’re to 
be allowed out an hour a day, but that is not enough. 
We must open the windows once an hour and do 
something active in here. Any volunteers to show 
us gymnastic exercises? Anybody who remembers 
them from school days? I don’t know one.” 

Yes, there were several, and one whose sister was 
a woman doctor using curative gymnastics. ‘The 
meeting voted to make them an athletic committee, 
to organize such activities. 

“Now, our digestions. You know how all prison- 
ers in Germany have always come home with ruined 
digestions. Is there anything we can do here? Is 
there anybody here experienced in cooking who 
could guess at the raw materials in that fearful mess 
we’ve just finished, and does she think it might be 
cooked more intelligently so that it would be better? 
It stands to reason that the prison cooks would 
naturally be incompetent, and indifferent to their 
results. Could we do better ourselves? It also 
stands to reason that we’d be allowed to, because it 
would mean less work for the prison kitchens.” A 
group of housewives was appointed to consider this, 
next day. 

“Now, as to cleanliness. Any suggestions about 
how to get along with no soap? We don’t dare use 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 53 


soap on the floor, we have so little, but heaven knows 
it needs it!” All the practical housekeepers spoke 
at once now, crying out upon her lack of ingenuity 
in not thinking of sand. That sandy path outside 
the barracks, that would do excellently well as an 
abrasive. With plenty of water and energy, sand 
and some bricks for rubbing, everything in the room 
could be cleaned. As they spoke, their faces bright- 
ened at the prospect of having cleanliness about 
them, and of being active once more. 

“Anything more for the body?” asked Octavie. 
“If we keep it exercised and clean, and as well-fed 
as we can manage it, it ought to last us. Now for 
the mind. We’re going to have hours and hours of 
leisure time such as we busy women never had be- 
fore. It’s the chance of our lives to go on with our 
education. Let’s share each of us with the other, 
what we have in our minds. I'll begin. I have 
chemistry thoroughly, economic history fairly, and 
the general theory of physics. Ill give a course 
of lectures on those. Who can do something 
else?” 

They were all appalled at this and protested that 
she was the only one who had any information to 
impart; but she scouted the idea and began a relent- 
less person-to-person inquiry. The result was that 


54 RAW MATERIAL 


a group of musicians were organized, under the 
guidance of the music teacher, to give lectures on 
the history of music, the lives and works of the com- 
posers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. 
Three other women who had brought up great fami- 
lies were to dive deep into their memories and lec- 
ture to the others, as logically, coherently, and ra- 
tionally as they could on proper care for chil- 
dren. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman was found 
to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to 
lecture on the life and education of that country. 
The German-speaking ones were to give a course in 
German. Another, the daughter of a well-known 
professor of French literature, was to assemble and 
arrange what she knew, and be prepared to plan and 
lead literary discussions. Another, the distinguished 
founder and former head of the best hospital in 
Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick— 
and soon. From one, from another, from them all, 
Octavie drew potential treasures of experience and 
information which lay almost visibly shimmering in 
a great heap before them—‘Enough,” she cried tri- 
umphantly, “‘to last us for years!” 

“‘And now because we’re not solemn Anglo-Saxons, 
but F renchwomen, we must plan for some fun, if 
we’re to keep themselves alive,” she told them 


Peo AD GOES UP’... 55 


firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the 
idea, she said, “Yes, we must. It’s part of our de- 
fensive campaign. Our task is to construct out of 
our brains and wills a little fortress of civilization, 
and to protect ourselves behind its walls against de- 
moralization and barbarism! And you all know 
that amusement is needed for civilization!”” A ma- 
jority agreed to this, a dramatic committee was ap- 
pointed, and another one on games (Octavie sug- 
gested drawing checker-boards on the tables, play- 
ing with bits of paper for men, and starting a free- 
for-all tournament); some one else thought of manu- 
facturing balls and inventing games to be played 
with them, and there were two packs of cards, in the 
miscellaneous store. The musical group undertook 
to provide a weekly concert. 

One of the subjects which had been canvassed and 
found no professor was the history of France; but 
like all French people, they had been soundly and 
carefully instructed in history and planned, by put- 
ting all their memories together, to reconstruct the 
story of their nation. The meeting was trailing off 
from serious, purposeful planning to a discursive at- 
tempt to get the list of French kings complete, when 
one of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low 
tone, the quality of which instantly made silence 


56 RAW MATERIAL 


about them. She said, “But Mlle. Moreau, we have 
souls too, souls hard beset.” 

Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, domi- 
nated the situation! Now she, who has not been in- 
side a church since she was a child, and who con- 
siders herself thoroughly emancipated from what she 
calls, ‘‘all that theological nonsense,” was brought 
up short before the need to make just such a whole- 
hearted concession to other people’s ideas as she had 
urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the 
speaker. It was the foundress of the hospital, Mme. 
Rouart. From her eyes looked out a personality 
just as strong as Octavie’s, and tinctured to the core 
with faith. Octavie’s arrogant intellectualism hum- 
bled itself at the sight. She made a gesture of ac- 
quiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on, 
“‘We’re of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray.” 

Then, after an instant’s pause, she said in a low, 
trembling voice, “Let us pray.” 

There was an interval of intense silence, during 
which, so Octavie told me afterwards, quite without 
any shade of irony, she “prayed as hard as any one 

. and after that I prayed every evening when 
the others did.” 

“How did you pray?” I asked her, incredulously. 

Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “I 


pian GOES OUP... .” 57 


set every ounce of will power to calling up all my 
strength and endurance. It was wonderful how I 
felt it rise, when I called,” she said gravely. She 
added that on that first evening after her silent 
plunge to the deep places of power in her soul, she 
put both arms around Mme. Rouart’s neck and 
kissed her. “I loved her,” she said simply, without 
attempting her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis 
of reasons. 

Other kisses were exchanged, soberly, as the stiff, 
tired women stumbled to their feet to go to bed. 
They laid their exhausted bodies down heavily on 
the dirty blankets, but in their hearts which had ~ 
seemed burned out to ashes with grief, indignation, 
and despair, there shone a living spark of purpose. 
Some time later, into the darkness came the voice of 
one of the younger women. ‘Oh, I’ve just remem- 
bered! That fourth son of Clovis was Charibert;” 
to which Octavie’s voice answered exultantly, “Ah, 
they never can beat us/” 

The life which went on after this seems as real 
to me as though I had lived it with them, because 
when I first saw them, they were fresh from it, and 
could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at 
them full of the noisome poison of prison life, idle- 
ness, indifference, despair, bitterness, hatred, per- 


58 RAW MATERIAL 


sonal degeneration; and every day they poured out 
this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelli- 
gent occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodi- 
gious undertaking, which they attacked in squads, 
turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks for 
rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it 
took hours to do it. Even the blankets were washed 
out after a fashion, one by one at intervals, by 
women who had never before so much as washed out 
a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more 
than inadequate utensils and poor materials and the 
stove unsuited for cooking was a tremendous prob- 
lem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly 
acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service 
came; and the food, though poor, monotonous, and 
coarse, was infinitely superior, being prepared with 
brains and patience, to what was served all around 
them to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian 
and Polish women and men, sunk despairingly in 
degradation and disease, “giving up and lying 
down in their dirt,’ Octavie told me, “to die like 
beasts.” 

The older and weaker women among the Tour- 
ciennes group, who could not holystone the floor and 
carry water and wood, were set at the lighter tasks, 
the endless mending which kept their garments 


“WHAT GOES UP .. .” 59 


from becoming mere rags, peeling turnips, washing 
dishes, “making the beds” as they called the process 
of drying and airing the straw in the bunks. 

Every day they went out in all weathers, and 
exercised and played ball with their home-made, 
straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they played 
games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, 
told stories and sang. They all “studied singing” 
and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or the whole forty 
in achorus. They sang anything any one could re- 
member, old folk-songs of which there are such an 
infinite variety in French, ballads, church-chants, 
songs from operas. 

Octavie told me that one evening, when the false 
news which was constantly served to them was spe- 
cially bad, when they had been told that half the 
French Army was taken prisoner, and the other 
half in retreat south of Paris, they sang with the 
tears running down their cheeks, but still sang, and 
kept their hearts from breaking. 

Every day there were “lessons.” Octavie was the 
only trained teacher among them, so that her courses 
in general science and in economic history were the 
most professional of the instructions given; but she 
sedulously attended the “courses” given by the 
others, putting her disciplined mind on the matter 


60 RAW MATERIAL 


they had to present, and by adroit questionings and 
summarizings, helped them to order it coherently 
and logically. Once a week they had dramatics, 
scenes out of Moliére, or Labiche, or Shakespeare, 
or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama, anything of 
which anybody had any recollection, with improvi- 
sations in the passages which nobody could remem- 
ber. The German guards looked on astonished at 
the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter 
and applause from the bunks, where the audience 
was installed to leave the room clear for a stage. 
Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun 
to suck the marrow out of the meaty Moliére 
comedies, as she did in the stifling days of midsum- 
mer when they were giving a series of his plays. 

By midsummer they had learned that one of the 
younger married women had been pregnant when 
she left France, that a French child was to be born 
in that German prison. How they all yearned over 
the homesick young mother! How important old 
Mme. Rouart became with her medical and nurse’s 
lore! What anxious consultations about the prepa- 
rations of the layette, manufactured out of spare 
undergarments and a pair of precious linen sheets 
brought from home. They were supposed to have 
medical attention furnished in the prison, but they 


UWHAL<SOES UP}. .” 61 


had seen too much of the brutal roughness of the 
overworked and indifferent army-surgeons of the 
camp, not to feel a horror at the thought of their at- 
tending delicate little Mme. Larconneur. She 
begged them desperately not to call in a doctor, but 
themselves to help her through her black hours. 
They were terrified at the responsibility, and as her 
time drew near, with the ups and downs of those 
last days, they were almost as frightened and tremu- 
lous as she. 

But the night when she called out in a strangled 
voice that she needed help, found them all organized, 
each one with her work planned: some who sprang 
from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart pre- 
pared as far as her poor substitute for a nurse’s out- 
fit would allow her; others ready to lift the shiver- 
ing, groaning woman from her own bunk to the one 
which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling 
water, and kept ready. The others, who could not 
help, lay in their beds, their hands clenched tightly 
in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade, 
shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life 
opened solemnly there in that poor place. 

When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was 
like a shout of triumph. 

“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxious 


62 RAW MATERIAL 


women, “a fine little boy. No! nobody must stir! 
Perfect quiet for Mme. Larconneur.” She busied her- 
self with the mother, while her two assistants oiled 
the baby and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over 
the perfections of his tiny finished body, and mur- 
muring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such 
a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!— 
Oh, see how he fights us!” 

The next morning they formed in line to worship 
him as he lay sleeping beside his mother, and al- 
though the sight brought a fierce stab of misery to 
all the mothers who had left their children behind, 
the little boy brought into their lives an element of 
tenderness and hopeful forward-looking which was 
curative medicine for their sick, women’s hearts. 

For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical 
therapeutics, there were intolerable moments and 
hours and days for all of them. Women, loving 
women, used to a life-time of care for others, used 
to the most united family life, left for months at a 
time without the slightest news of those they had 
left, could not, valiantly as they might try, master 
the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon 
them in the midst of the courageously planned life 
which they led. They all came to recognize in others 
the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the fixed, 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 63 


unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving 
whole-hearted sympathy could ease human hearts, 
such moments of unendurable pain were tempered 
by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s 
sorrow. 

And then, of course, there were other bad mo- 
ments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, 
when it took all of one’s self-control to prevent ex- 
plosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; 
quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding 
on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other 
people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, al- 
most as much as physical suffering, embittered and 
poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely or- 
ganized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great 
War. Forty women, with lowered physical health, 
with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidi- 
ous privacy, now shut up together in one room, with 
no chance ever to escape each other, crowded 
each other morally almost as much as physically. 
Octavie told me there were days when she would 
have liked to slap them, weak, wavering, supersti- 
tious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her 
face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating 
the human race. And one of the devout Catholics 
told me that she often longed so intensely for her old 


64. RAW MATERIAL 


atmosphere of belief and faith that she was almost ill. 
But they adopted as their battle-cry, ‘“‘All together 
to defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to 
this resolve, they fought away from everything that 
might have separated them and struggled out on 
ground common to them all. 

Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, 
gray days. There was sickness in the camp, a ter- 
rible wave of influenza, carrying off hundreds all 
around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, 
boiled every drop of water, exercised, played, 
mended, studied, cooked, sang, kept steadily on with 
the ordered precision of their lives. But old Mme. 
Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led 
the silent prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured 
silently a few bitter days of suffering, died, and was 
borne out from among them to be buried in alien 
soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to 
death, and slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them 
more Closely together than ever, as they realized how 
utterly they depended on each other, and after this 
there were fewer struggles against black days of bad 
temper. ‘The little boy was seven months old now, 
laughed and crowed, and played with his fingers. 

Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought 
to protect their little shining taper of civilization, 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 65 


feeding it from their hearts and minds. When they 
went outdoors for the daily escape from their room 
to the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, 
they seemed with their neat, threadbare, faded, 
well-mended garments, with their gray, carefully 
dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with 
brave eyes and smiling lips, like another order of 
being from the shaggy, dirt-crusted, broken-down 
Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals were on 
each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling 
mist or quarreling among themselves. They were 
known by this time all over the camp, and the de- 
moralized, desperate men watched the decent 
Frenchwomen with that most humanizing of emo- 
tions, respect. 

Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, 
shoulder to shoulder, indomitable in the patient use 
of their intelligence, in their long triumphant battle 
against the weakness and evil in their own nature,, 
which were, as they had known from the first, the: 
only things in the world which could harm them? 


What a race to belong to! 


Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks 
of excited rumor, a confused, bewildered period of 


66 RAW MATERIAL 


guesses and half hopes, when nobody, not even the 
guards, knew what was happening at the front. The 
camp was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no 
certainty of anything. Our little group of women 
clung to each other, as the world rocked round them, 
till the evening when the guards came running to 
take them to the train. Not an instant to spare; 
the thousands of other prisoners were yelling in the 
riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces. 
They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild 
confusion of the journey, standing up in locked cat- 
tle-cars, frantic to know what was happening, with 
no idea in the world where they were or where the 
train was taking them, until the moment when the 
jolting cars stopped, the locked doors were broken 
open and French voices out of the darkness cried, 
““Mesdames, vous étes chez vous!” 

They were at home, at their own station, a faint 
gray light showing the well-known pointed roofs of 
their own city, the massive tower of the old Town 
Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform, 
where they had seen so many deported prisoners 
return, vermin-ridden, filthy, half-imbecile, a burden 
to themselves and their families, there they were, 
lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer 
human beings than they had been before. Half- 


“WHAT GOES UP...” 65 


awed by the greatness of their victory, they stood 
there, like ghosts. who had fought their way back 
from the grave, peering out through the dim light 
at their own homes. 


That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it? 

But you know as well as I do that five years have 
passed since that morning when they stood there, 
awe-struck and transfigured. And I cannot conceal 
the fact that I have seen them all ae a good. 
many times since then. 

What are they doing with themselves now? Well, 
the last time I made a round of visits among them, 
I found the housewives concerned about their pre- 
serves and the hang of their skirts; the business- 
women deep in calculations about how to get around: 
the sinful rate of exchange. The mothers were 
bringing up their children very hard, as we all do, 
very much concerned about their knowing the chil- 
dren of the right people and no others. The teach- 
ers were grumbling about the delay in the promised 
raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny 
of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. 
Baudoin, now that her children are old enough to 
go to school, often leaves them with the servants and 
runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun. 


68 RAW MATERIAL 


All the returned hostages have grown quite stout, 
and they have taken up bridge whist with enthusi- 
asm, once more. 

As for Octavie, the last time I saw her, she was on 
fire with interest over a little green-house she was 
having built back of the kitchen, so that she might 
have fresh green vegetables the year around. It 
was very hard to achieve such a thing, what with the 
lack of workmen, the scarcity of bricks, and the high 
price of glass. But Octavie was sure she could 
manage it. 

And so am I. Octavie can always manage any- 
thing she tries for. 


OLD MAN WARNER 


I Must warn you at the outset that unless you or 
some of your folks came from Vermont, it is hardly 
worth your while to read about Old Man Warner. 
You will not be able to see anything in his story ex- 
cept, aS we say in Vermont, a “gape and swallow” 
about nothing. Well, I don’t claim much dramatic 
action for the story of old man Warner, but I am 
setting it down on the chance that it may fall into 
the hands of some one brought up on Vermont 
stories as I was. I know that for him there will be 
something in Old Man Warner’s life, something of 
Vermont, something we feel and cannot express, 
as we feel the incommunicable aura of a person- 
ality. 

The old man has been a weight on the collective 
mind of our town ever since I was a little girl, and 
that is a long time ago. He was an old man even 
then. Year after year, as our Board of Selectmen 
planned the year’s town budget they had this worry 
about Old Man Warner, and what to do with him. 
It was not that old Mr. Warner was a dangerous 

69 


mn RAW MATERIAL 


character, or anything but strictly honest and law- 
abiding. But he had his own way of bothering his 
fellow citizens. 

In his young days he had inherited a farm from 
his father, back up in Arnold Hollow, where at that 
time, about 1850, there was a cozy little settlement 
of five or six farms with big families. He settled 
there, cultivated the farm, married, and brought up 
a family of three sons. When the Civil War came, 
he volunteered together with his oldest boy, and 
went off to fight in the second year of the war. He 
came back alone in 1864, the son having fallen in 
the Battle of the Wilderness. And he went back up 
to Arnold Hollow to live and there he stayed, al- 
though the rest of his world broke up and re- 
arranged itself in a different pattern, mostly cen- 
tering about the new railroad track in the main val- 
ley. 

Only the older men returned to the Arnold Hol- 
low settlement to go on cultivating their steep, rocky 
farms. The younger ones set off for the West, the 
two remaining Warner boys with the others. Their 
father and mother stayed, the man hardly ever leav- 
ing the farm now even to go to town. His wife said 
once he seemed to feel as though he never could get 
caught up on the years he had missed during the 


OLD MAN WARNER m1 


war. She said he always had thought the world of 
his own home. 

The boys did pretty well out in Iowa, had the 
usual ups and downs of pioneer farmers, and by 
1898, when their mother died, leaving their father 
alone at seventy-one, they were men of forty-eight 
and forty-six, who had comfortable homes to which 
to invite him to pass his old age. 

Everybody in our town began to lay plans about 
what they would buy at the auction, when Old Man 
Warner would sell off his things, as the other Arnold 
Hollow families had. By this time, for one reason 
or another, the Warners were the only people left 
up there. The Selectmen planned to cut out the 
road up into Arnold Hollow, and put the tidy little 
sum saved from its upkeep into improvements on 
the main valley thoroughfare. But old Mr. Warner 
wrote his sons and told the Selectmen that he saw 
no reason for leaving his home to go and live in a 
strange place and be a burden to his children, with 
whom, having seen them at the rarest intervals dur- 
ing the last thirty years, he did not feel very well 
acquainted. And he always had liked his own home. 
Why should he leave it? It was pretty late in the 
day for him to get used to western ways. He’d 
just be a bother to his boys. He didn’t want to be 


72 RAW MATERIAL 


a bother to anybody, and he didn’t propose to be! 

There were a good many protests all round, but 
of course the Selectmen had not the faintest author- 
ity over him, and as quite probably his sons were 
at heart relieved, nothing was done. The town very 
grudgingly voted the money to keep up the Arnold 
Hollow road, but consoled itself by saying freely 
that the old cuss never had been so very bright and 
was worse now, evidently had no idea what he was 
trying to do, and would soon get tired of living alone 
and “doing for himself.” 

That was twenty-two years ago. Selectmen who 
were then vigorous and middle-aged, grew old, de- 
crepit, died, and were buried. Boys who were learn- 
ing their letters then, grew up, married, had chil- 
dren, and became Selectmen in their turn. Old Man 
Warner’s sons grew old and died, and the names of 
most of his grand-children, scattered all over the 
West, were unknown to us. And still the old man 
lived alone in his home and “did for himself.” 

Every spring, when road work began, the Select- 
men groaned over having to keep up the Arnold 
Hollow road, and every autumn they tried their 
best to persuade the old man to come down to a set- 
tlement where he could be taken care of. Our town 
is very poor, and taxes are a heavy item in our cal- 


OLD MAN WARNER 73 


culations. It is just all we can do to keep our schools 
and roads going, and we grudge every penny we are 
forced to spend on tramps, paupers, or the indigent 
sick. Selectmen in whose régime town expenses 
were high, are not only never reélected to town of- 
fice, but their name is a by-word and a reproach for 
years afterwards. We elect them, among other 
things, to see to it that town expenses are not high, 
and to lay their plans accordingly. 


Decades of Selectmen, heavy with this responsi- 
bility, tried to lay their plans accordingly in regard 
to Old Man Warner, and ran their heads into a stone 
wall. One Board of Selectmen after another knew 
exactly what would happen; the old dumb-head 
would get a stroke of paralysis, or palsy, or soften- 
ing of the brain, or something, and the town Treas- 
ury would bleed at every pore for expensive medical 
service, maybe an operation at a hospital, and after 
that, somebody paid to take care of him. If they 
could only ship him off to his family! One of the 
granddaughters, now a middle-aged woman, kept 
up a tenuous connection with the old man, and an- 
swered, after long intervals, anxious communica- 
tions from the Selectmen. Or if not that, if only 
they could get him down out of there in the winter, 


74. RAW MATERIAL 


so they would not be saddled with the perpetual 
worry about what was happening to him, with the 
perpetual need to break out the snow in the road 
and go up there to see that he was all right. 

But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough 
to see any reason why he should lie down on his own 
folks, or why he should not live in his own home. 
When gentle expostulations were tried, he always 
answered mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on 
living the way he was for a while longer; and when 
blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked the 
blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t 
no law in Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, 
s’long’s he paid his debts, and he didn’t owe any 
that he knew of. 

That was the fact, too. He paid spot cash for 
what he bought in his semi-yearly trips to the vil- 
lage to “do trading,” as our phrase goes. He bought 
very little, a couple of pairs of overalls a year, a 
bag apiece of sugar, and coffee, and rice, and salt, 
and flour, some raisins, and pepper. And once or 
twice during the long period of his hermit life, an 
Overcoat and a new pair of trousers. What he 
brought down from his farm was more than enough 
to pay for such purchases, for he continued to culti- 
vate his land, less and less of it, of course, each year, 


OLD MAN WARNER rE 


but still enough to feed his horse and cow and pig 
and hens, and to provide him with corn and potatoes 
and onions. He salted down and smoked a hog 
every fall and ate his hens when they got too old 
to lay. 

_ And, of course, as long as he was actually eco- 
nomically independent, the town, groaning with ap- 
prehension over the danger to its treasury though 
it was, could not lay a finger on the cranky old 
codger. And yet, of course, his economic indepen- 
dence couldn’t last! From one day to the next, 
something was bound to happen to him, something 
that would cost the town money. 

Each year the Selectmen planning the town ex- 
penditures with the concentrated prudence born of 
- hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental glance up 
Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that 
perhaps this was the year when money would have 
to be taken away from the road or the school fund 
to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing; 
and finally for his burial, because as the years went 
by, even the tenuous western granddaughter van- 
ished: died, or moved, or something. Old Man 
Warner was now entirely alone in the world. 

All during my childhood and youth he was a 
legendary figure of “sot” obstinacy and queerness. 


76 RAW MATERIAL 


We children used to be sent up once in a while, to 
take our turn in seeing that the old man was all 
right. It was an expedition like no other. You 
turned off the main road and went up the steep, 
stony winding mountain road, dense with the shade 
of sugar-maples and oaks. At the top, when your 
blown horse stopped to rest, you saw before you the 
grassy lane leading across the little upland plateau 
where the Arnold Hollow settlement had been. The 
older people said they could almost hear faint 
echoes of whetting scythes, and barking dogs, and 
cheerful homely noises, as there had been in the old 
days. But for us children there was nothing but a 
breathlessly hushed, sunny glade of lush meadows, 
oppressively silent and spooky, with a few eyeless 
old wrecks of abandoned farm houses, drooping and 
gray. You went past the creepy place as fast as 
your horse could gallop, and clattered into the 
thicket of shivering white birches which grew close 
to the road like a screen; and then—there was no 
sensation in my childhood quite like the coming out 
into the ordered, inhabited, humanized little clear- 
ing, in front of Old Man Warner’s home. ‘There 
were portly hens crooning around on the close- 
cropped grass, and a pig grunting sociably from his 
pen at you, and shining milk-pans lying in the sun 


OLD MAN WARNER 77 


tilted against the white birch sticks of the wood-pile, 
and Old Man Warner, himself, infinitely aged and 
stooped, in his faded, clean overalls, emerging from 
the barn-door to peer at you out of his bright old 
eyes and to give you a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a 
long ways from home, don’t you know it? Git off 
your horse, can’t ye? I’ve got a new calf in here.” 
Or perhaps if it were a Sunday, he sat in the sun on 
the front porch, with a clean shirt on, reading the 
weekly edition of the New York Tribune. He drove 
two miles every Saturday afternoon, down to his 
R. F. D. mail-box on the main road, to get this. 

You heard so much talk about him down in the 
valley, so much fussing and stewing about his being 
so “sot,” and so queer, that it always surprised you 
when you saw him, to find he was just like anybody 
else. You saw his calf, and had a drink of milk in 
his clean, well-scrubbed kitchen, and played with 
the latest kitten, and then you said good-by for that 
time, and got on your horse and went back through 
the birch thicket into the ghostly decay of the 
abandoned farms, back down the long, stony road 
to the valley where everybody was so cross with the 
unreasonable old man for causing them so much 
Worry. 

“How could he expect to go along like that, when 


78 RAW MATERIAL 


other old folks, so much younger than he, gave up 
and acted like other people, and settled down where 
you could take care of them! The house might 
burn down over his head, and he with it; or he might 
fall and break his hip and be there for days, yelling 
and fainting away till somebody happened to go by; 
or a cow might get ugly and hook him, and nobody 
to send for help.” All these frightening possibili- 
ties and many others had been repeatedly pre- 
sented to the old man himself with the elaborations 
and detail which came from heart-felt alarm about 
him. But he continued to say mildly that he guessed 
he’d go on living the way he was for a while yet. 

“A while!” He was ninety years old. 

And then he was ninety-one, and then ninety-two; 
and we were surer and surer he would “‘come on the 
town,” before each fiscal year was over. At the 
beginning of last winter our Selectmen went up in 
a body to try to bully or coax the shrunken, wizened 
old man, now only half his former size, to go down 
to the valley. He remarked that he ‘“‘guessed there 
wasn’t no law in Vermont” and so forth, just as he 
had to their fathers. He was so old, that he could 
no longer straighten up as he said it, for his back 
was helplessly bent with rheumatism, and for lack 


OLD MAN WARNER "9 


of teeth he whistled and clucked and lisped a good 
deal as he pronounced his formula. But his meaning 
was as clear as it had been thirty years ago. They 
came sulkily away without him, knowing that they 
would both be laughed at and blamed, in the valley, 
because the cussed old crab had got the best of 
them, again. 

Last February, a couple of men, crossing over to 
a lumber-job on Hemlock Mountain, by way of the 
Arnold Hollow road, saw no smoke coming out of 
the chimney, knocked at the door, and, getting no 
answer, opened it and stepped in. There lay Old 
Man Warner, dead on his kitchen floor in front of 
his well-blacked cook-stove. The tiny, crooked, old 
body was fully dressed, even to a fur cap and mit- 
tens, and in one hand was his sharp, well-ground ax. 
One stove-lid was off, and a charred stick of wood 
lay half in and half out of the fire box. Evidently 
the old man had stepped to the fire to put in a stick 
of wood before he went out to split some more, and 
had been stricken instantly, before he could move a 
step. His cold, white old face was composed and 
quiet, just as it had always been in life. 

The two lumbermen fed the half-starved pig and 
hens and turned back to the valley with the news, 


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driving the old man’s cow and horse in front of 
them; and in a couple of hours we all knew that Old 
Man Warner had died, all alone, in his own kitchen. 


Well, what do you think! We were as stirred up 
about it—! We turned out and gave him one of 
the best funerals the town ever saw. And we put. 
up a good marble tombstone that told all about 
how he had lived. We found we were proud of him, 
as proud as could be, the darned old bull-dog, who 
had stuck it out all alone, in spite of us. We brag 
now about his single-handed victory over old age 
and loneliness, and we keep talking about him to the 
children, just as we brag about our grandfather’s 
victories in the Civil War, and talk to the children 
about the doings of the Green Mountain Boys. Old 
Man Warner has become history. We take as much 
satisfaction in the old fellow’s spunk, as though he 
had been our own grandfather, and we spare our 
listeners no detail of his story: “. . . And there he 
stuck year after year, with the whole town plaguing 
at him to quit. And he earned his own living, and 
chopped his own wood, and kept himself and the 
house just as decent, and never got queer and 
frowzy and half-cracked, but stayed just like any- 
body, as nice an old man as ever you saw—all alone, 


OLD MAN WARNER 81 


all stark alone—beholden to nobody—asking no 
odds of anybody—yes, sir, and died with his boots 
on, at ninety-three, on a kitchen floor you could 
have et off of, ’twas so clean.” 





THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 


DurRInc the first winter I spent in the boarding- 
school on the Rue de Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters 
were the mainstay of my life. It was not that I 
needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, al- 
though we were driven like dogs by the grindingly 
thorough teachers, for lessons are lessons, wherever 
you find them, hard and tense though they may be in 
France, easy and loose in America. It was quite an- 
other part of our school life which routed me, the 
training in deportment and manners, carried on in 
three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping 
old man, light and dry as a cork. 

His little juiceless body was light, but everything 
else about him was heavy with the somber earnest- 
ness of his determination to teach us what he con- 
sidered the manners of women of the world. Thrice 
a week we were obliged to begin those lessons by a 
ceremonious entry into the big salon, four by four, 
advancing in time to music across the bare shining 
desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under 


our breaths, “one, two, three, four, glide, bend, re- 
83 


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cover, glide,” as we courtesied to the Directrice, “‘ad- 
vance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend, re- 
cover, glide,”—-here we saluted the Sous-Directrice 
—‘advance again (I was always shaking partly with 
giggles at the absurdity of the whole business, partly 
with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour), 
“one, two three, four, glide, bend . . .” but usually 
at this point of my attempted bow to the Professor of 
Deportment I was harshly told to go back and start 
the whole agonizing ritual over. 

That was before the Brodard girls took me in 
hand and, flanking me on either side, swept me for- 
ward on the crest of their perfect advance and genu- 
flection to the coveted place of safety on the other 
side of the room where, in a black-robed line, the lit- 
tle girls who had made a correct entry awaited fur- 
ther instructions in the manners of the world. 

The support of the three Brodard girls did not 
stop short when they had engineered me through the 
matter of getting into a room. The professor him- 
self was not more steeped in a religious sense of the 
importance of his instruction than were Madeleine, 
Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. ‘The insensate inner 
laughter which constantly threatened to shake the 
lid of my decorum, was safely muffled by their 
whole-souled attention as we stood there, watching 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 85 


the elegant gestures and still more elegant immobili- 
ties of Professor Delacour, as he explained the les- 
son of the day. 

One day we were taught how to put money into 
the contribution-box in church, “not with a pre- 
occupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent 
smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified ges- 
ture.” Then he would pass the velvet contribution 
bag down the line, and forty little girls must each 
find the right expression, “‘not bored, or preoccupied, 
not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, 
gravely—quietly—with dignity.” 

I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver 
of mingled terror and mirth with which at twelve 
years of age, I prepared to be, “not bored or preoc- 
cupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but quiet 
—dignified—” I would never have lived through 
it if I had not been hypnotized by the Brodard 
girls. 

Or perhaps we were required to be ladies step- 
ping from a carriage and crossing a side-walk to 
enter a theater, keenly conscious of the eyes of the 
crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spec- 
tators, “graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, 
and above all, unconscious, entirely natural and un- 
conscious.” ‘Then two by two, squirmingly the cen- 


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ter of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imag- 
inary sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, 
“quiet, graceful, above all unconscious, entirely nat- 
ural and unconscious. . . .” Do you suppose for a 
moment I could have escaped annihilation at the 
hands of our High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had 
not been my fellow acolyte, applying all her ortho- 
dox convictions to the problem set before us? 

Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, 
in and out of the class in deportment, for they were 
as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good 
behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of 
Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would 
have been sure that they were preparing to enter 
the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impres- 
sion by no means contradicted by the aspect of their 
mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who 
brought them to school at the beginning of the term, 
and once in a while made the tiresome trip from 
Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards 
must have had some training in genuine good-breed- 
ing as well as the quaint instruction given by Pro- 
fessor Delacour, for they never made any preten- 
sions to wealth or social standing—they said very 
little of any sort about their home life. 

Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 87 


with them, and at once I understood a good deal 
more about them. Young as I was—fourteen at 
the time—it was plain to me as it would have been 
to any observer, that they took their lessons in “so- 
ciety manners” so seriously because society manners 
and any occasions for using them were the only 
things lacking in the home where they were so com- 
fortable, so much loved, and so well cared for. 
They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a 
small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and al- 
though their mother had a genius for keeping every- 
thing on a plane of strict gentility, their big, gay, 
roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramp- 
ing red editor of the most ramping red radical 
newspaper in that part of France, the center of all 
the anti-everything agitations going on in the region. 

As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone 
days, when. I was fourteen years old (but not at all 
as it happens now-a-days) what they called ramping 
and redness looked very plain and obvious to an 
American. Most of what M. Brodard was making 
such a fuss about, seemed to me just what every- 
body at home took for granted: for instance his 
thesis that every man ought to earn his own living 
no matter how high his social position might be. I 
was astonished that anybody could consider that a 


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revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brod- 
ard was what people would call now-a-days a femi- 
nist, expounding hotly his conviction that women 
should be trusted with the responsibility for the con- 
duct of their own lives, and the earning of their own 
livings. These opinions found no echo at all in the 
serious-minded middle-class families of his town, nor 
indeed in his family, but they were an old story to 
me. I told him as much, informing him confidently 
from my wide experience as a child in the impecuni- 
ous faculty of a western State-University, that 
everybody in America expected as a matter of course 
to earn his and her own living—everybody! He ac- 
cepted this as unquestioningly as I advanced it, with 
the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him in 
all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, in- 
deed, that on the strength of my testimony he actu- 
ally wrote some editorials about America in his furi- 
ously convinced style. 

Of course he was the champion of the working 
classes as against the bourgeoisie, adored by the 
first and hated by the second. It was an adventure 
to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets 
of the musty little town. Everywhere the lean, 
sinewy men in working clothes and the thin women 
in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashing 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 89 


look of pleasure to see his great frame come strid- 
ing vigorously along. Everywhere the artisans 
stopped their work to call a hearty greeting to him, 
or to step quickly to meet him, full of some griev- 
ance, sure of his sympathy, and comforted by the 
quick flame of his indignation. And everywhere the 
very sight of him put a taste of green apples into the 
mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could 
see that by the sour expression of their broad, florid 
faces. The prosperous merchant at the door of his 
shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily 
within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching 
along, humming a tune, his hat cocked light-heart- 
edly over one ear. The lawyer in his black broad- 
cloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in ex- 
pensive furs stepped high, drew their long skirts 
about them, and looked him straight in the eye, with 
an expression half fear, half horror. This last 
made him break out into the hearty, full-throated 
laugh, always close to the surface with him 
—the laugh that was as characteristic a part of him 
as the shape of his nose. 

I understood now why Mme. Brodard sent the 
girls away to school. They would have been out- 
casts in any bourgeoise school in their own town. 
Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of the pub- 


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lic schools and never lost an opportunity of defend- 
ing against their bitter critics the public lycées for 
girls, then just struggling into being in France. I 
wondered a little that he should allow his daugh- 
ters to go to such a boarding-school as ours. But 
it seemed that the angry resistance of the moneyed 
and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that 
time prevented the establishment of a public lycée 
for girls there. This enabled Mme. Brodard to 
steer past another dangerous headland in the com- 
plicated course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm- 
hearted M. Brodard was not inclined to be too hard 
on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the adoring 
manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much 
from his devoted wife in the way of conforming to 
his ideas. 

Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was 
all one miracle of adroit achievement in reconciling 
irreconcilable elements and effecting impossible com- 
promises. She had married her husband when they 
were both young (he must have been an irresistible 
suitor), and before his hot-headed sympathies for 
the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good and 
devoted French wife, she never admitted that any- 
thing her Bernard did was other than what she 
would wish. But she remained exactly what she 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD gI 


had been at the time of her marriage, and although 
she was deeply attached to her kind and faithful 
husband and made the best of homes for him, she 
had not the slightest intention of changing a hair 
or becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a de- 
voted believer in social distinctions, in the Church, 
in the laboring classes as such and in their places, 
and above all in the excellence of owning property 
and inheriting money. 

On this last point M. Brodard went much further 
than anything I had heard discussed at home, and 
poured out incessantly in brilliant editorials a tor- 
rent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, 
upon the sacred institution of inheritance, the very 
keystone of the French social edifice. ‘How ridicu- 
lous,” he used to write on mornings when no other 
forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained 
charge, “that the mere chance of birth, or a personal 
caprice, should put vast sums of unearned wealth 
into the hands of a man who has not had the slight- 
est connection with its production. Property, the 
amassing of wealth by a man who has had the acu- 
men and force to produce it . . . we may have two 
opinions about that, about whether he should be al- 
lowed to keep for himself all he can lay his hands 
on. But there can be no two opinions about the 


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hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up son 
has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his 
son who has no more to do with it than the Em- 
peror of China, save by a physiological accident. 
A hundred years from now, people will be laughing 
at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we 
now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole 
provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed 
from the hand of one master to another, because 
somebody had married somebody else.” 

Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she 
minded such editorials least of all. ‘That is a prin- 
ciple that will never touch our lives!” she said with 
melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was 
the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. 
She herself had been an orphan and all the Brodard 
elders were dead, having left nothing to the family 
of such an enemy to society as they considered Ber- 
nard to be. 

She did not complain; she never complained of 
anything her husband did; but it was plain to see 
that she thought it her obvious duty to protect her 
daughters from the consequences of their dear 
father’s ideas. The income from her dowry kept 
them at school and dressed them at home, and as 
the oldest began to approach the marriageable age 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 93 


Mme. Brodard cast about her with silent intensity 
for some possible means for stretching that dowry 
to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. 
She knew of course that this was an impossible un- 
dertaking; but all her married life had been an im- 
possible undertaking carried through to success, and 
she did not despair, although there were times when 
she looked white and anxious. 

But this was never when M. Brodard was at 
home. Indeed it was impossible for any one to be 
tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety of M. Brod- 
ard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, 
harrow, waxed, and polished interior was like the 
entrance of a military band playing a quick-step. 
He was always full of his latest crusade, fired with 
enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He 
made you feel that he was the commanding officer of 
a devoted force, besieging an iniquitous old enemy, 
and every day advancing further toward victory. 
Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy 
walls of cowardly traditional injustice, and sunshine 
would stream into the dark places! 

Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as 
light-hearted as a boy, electrifying the most stag- 
nant air with the vibrant current of his conviction 
that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Big 


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girls as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games 
of hide-and-seek; and never in any later evenings of 
my life have I rocked in such gales of fun as on the 
evenings when we played charades. An impersona- 
tion of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave 
as part of the word, “ampoule” has remained with 
me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious foolery 
never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In 
the following charade we laughed so at his “‘crea- 
tion” of a fateful Napoleon that we could not sit on 
our chairs; and after that, carried away by his own 
high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village 
fair (he was a prodigiously powerful athlete) lift- 
ing a feather with a grotesque display of swelling 
muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which 
all but finished me. ‘The tears of mirth used to 
come to my eyes as I recalled that evening, and 
many a taut, high-strung moment of my adolescence 
in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the 
remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter. 

M. Brodard’s laughter . . . alas! 

And yet at the very time when his care-free, fear- 
less laughter so filled my ears, he was standing out 
single-handed against the most poisonous hostility, 
to force an investigation of a framed-up law case, 
in which a workingman had been defrauded of his 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 95 


rights. Apparently there was always some such 
windmill against which he thought it necessary to 
charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never 
diminished. We went back to school after that va- 
cation leaving him the center of a pack of yelling 
vituperations from all the staid and solid citizens of 
the region .. . “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brod- 
ard girls always said, imitating their mother’s ac- 
cent. 

To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed 
queerer than ever, after that great gust of stormy, 
ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls were used to 
such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper 
than ever, up to their very necks, into the atmos- 
phere of gentility. They had caught more than their 
mother’s accent, they had caught her deep anxiety 
about their future, her passionate determination 
that the ideas of their father should not drag them 
into that impossible world of workingmen, radicals 
and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular 
choice of their excellent poor dear Papa. 

When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well- 
cut tailored dress which I now knew to be the only 
one she possessed, she reported that Papa, by sheer 
capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top 
of his great voice, had obtained a re-trial and acquit- 


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tal of that tiresome workingman, and was now off 
on a new tack, was antagonizing all the merchants 
of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness 
to their hapless employees. It seemed that libel- 
suits were thick in the air, and the influential mem- 
bers of society crossed to the other side of the street 
when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how 
poor dear Papa seems to thrive on all that!” 

Well, Ze might thrive on all that, but Madeleine, 
Lucie, and Clotilde knew very well that nothing 
they wanted would thrive on “all that.” Their only 
salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to 
prepare themselves for that escape, they smeared 
themselves, poor things, from head to foot with good 
breeding. They had nothing but themselves, 
Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at 
least no one should be able to guess from their man- 
ners that their home life had not been conventional. 
Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with 
her banker about re-investing some of her little for- 
tune, so that it would mean more income. When 
Madeleine left school, they would need more, Heaven 
knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the 
head of the house. What could they do to rise to 
that crisis? When Madeleine left school ... an 
abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps go 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 97 


south, to a winter resort for a few months every 
year, where there were no Morvilliers people, where 
there might be eligible young men . . . or even some 
not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, 
when they thought of it, for after Madeleine, there 
were Lucie and Clotilde! 

I was sent home to America in June that year, be- 
fore the end of the school-term. The good-bys were 
said at lunch-time, before my schoolmates went off 
to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the 
Brodards at the time, was through the door of the 
salon as I passed on my way to the street. They 
were learning how to handle a fan, how to open it— 
“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant 
girl, but flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the 
wrist of one hand . . . not so abrupt! .. . smooth, 
Suave, with an aristocratic .. .” As I went down 
the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away 
on these words. I wondered what poor dear Papa 
was up to now. 

Two years later when I was taken back to France 
and went to visit the Brodards, I found that he was 
still up to the same sort of thing. Just then he was 
making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly 
unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village 
six or seven kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old 


98 RAW MATERIAL 


M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to South America in 
his youth, had accumulated some property there, 
and had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with 
so it was said, enough money to live on, he had come 
back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable little home 
there, and settled down to end his days in his birth- 
place. But Fressy, as it happened, had always been 
and still was noted for its piety and conservatism. 
The curé of the parish was a man of flaming zeal, 
and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramon- 
tane. ‘Till then their influence had been unques- 
tioned in the town. They had boasted that there 
was one loyal village left in France where none of 
the poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the 
working classes, and to wean them from their duti- 
ful submission to the rule of their spiritual and secu- 
lar betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had 
overlooked the existence of such a village near him. 

His attention was now very much called to it 
by the persecution of old M. Duval. The persistent 
and ostentatious absence from Mass of the returned 
traveler was follower by a shower of stones which 
broke most of his windows. His easy-going advice 
given publicly in a café to some young workmen of 
the town to follow his example, to stand up for 
themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 99 


by the poisoning of his dog. The old fellow became 
indignant, and never dreaming of the heat of the 
feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le 
Curé one day in the street, and asked him—as if 
the priest had anything to do with what was hap- 
pening !—whether the laws of France did or did not 
permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no 
matter what his opinions were! That night some 
anonymous defender of the status quo set fire to his 
chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard 
began to be aware of the existence of Fressy. 

Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. 
“The police.” That sounds very fine, but the police 
of Fressy meant a solitary old garde-champétre 
whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and 
whose only daughter was the cook in the house of the 
fiercely legitimatist Mayor. It is not surprising that 
the next morning, the scoffing unbeliever from over- 
seas found that somehow marauders had eluded ‘“‘the 
police,’ and laid waste his promising kitchen-gar- 
den. They intended (they proclaimed it openly) to 
drive out from their sanctified midst, the man who 
flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and 
godless life. 

But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on 
his unparalleled capacity for making a noise. He 


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stormed out to Fressy to see the old man, thoroughly 
frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding 
at intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped 
him in his arms, as though M. Duval had been his 
own kin; and swore that he would prove to him that 
justice and freedom existed in France to-day as al- 
ways. ‘The old man’s nerves were shaken by his 
troubled nights and his harried sense of invisible 
enemies all about him. Until that moment it had 
seemed to him that all the world was against him. 
His relief was immense. He returned M. Brodard’s 
embrace emotionally, his trembling old arms clasped 
hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his 
scared old eyes. 

Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, 
tore the throttle open, and let her go. . . to the 
great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the girls, the 
two elder of whom were now very reluctantly pre- 
paring themselves to teach, for they had not been 
able to organize the longed-for escape. That was 
the situation when I visited them. 

Of course in due time the intemperate publicity 
about the matter put an end to the attacks on M. 
Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s quick- 
fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears 
of the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office orders 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 101 


to “see to that matter” were issued, and came with 
imperative urgence even to the royalist Mayor of 
Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unoffi- 
cial orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. 
There was even a victim sacrificed to shut M. Brod- 
ard’s too-articulate mouth. The garde-champétre 
lost his position and his chance for a pension, which 
was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose 
only intention had been to do his duty as he saw 
it. 

By the time that I was back in America in col- 
lege, Clotilde wrote me that all that disturbance 
had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old thing, had 
come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, 
to thank him with deep emotion for the intense 
peace and comfort of his present life. I could read 
between the lines that Clotilde thought they might 
very well have a little more of those commodities in 
their own life. 

After that I heard from some one else (for M. 
Brodard and his ideas were becoming famous) that 
the opposition had finally caught him in a legal 
technicality, something connected with his campaign 
for tearing down the miserable old disease-soaked 
medieval hovels where many poor people lived in 
Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatened rook- 


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eries chipped in together, hired expensive expert 
legal advice, and finally, to their immense satisfac- 
tion, succeeded in getting a tiny sentence of im- 
prisonment, for defamation of their characters, in- 
flicted on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two 
weeks, I believe, which was a fortnight of pure 
glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of them, 
came tramping in to see him from all the region 
round, bringing tribute. His “cell” was heaped with 
flowers, he fared on the finest game and fattest poul- 
try, and .. . what pleased him vastly more... 
the fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison 
about the infamy of wretched lodgings for poor 
families were noticed and reprinted everywhere in 
France, where the circumstances of his grotesque 
imprisonment were known. 

The condemnation which his opponents meant to 
be a crushing disgrace turned out an apotheosis. 
He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged from 
his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher 
spirits than ever, his name shining with the praise 
of generous-hearted men all over the country. He 
cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and 
strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly 
from beneath his feet. 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 103 


The morning after his release from prison, news 
came from Fressy that old M. Duval had died of 
apoplexy. 

Well, what of that? Ah, what of that .. .? 

He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, 
and it seemed he was frightfully rich: it came to 
more than three million francs. 


Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew 
he would. What else would you have had him do? 
It’s all very well to have abstract ideas about the 
absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your 
own daughters ...and your own wife... ex- 
pect so confidently ... 

Mme. Brodard, you see . . . he was devoted to 
his wife who had so faithfully made the best of 
homes for him; and to his daughters whom he loved 
so dearly. ... 

Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their 
faces at the news? And they’d already been sacri- 
ficed so many years for his ideas. . . . Ideas! 

What do you suppose he could do but accept it? 


I don’t know one thing about the inner history of 
this period when M. Brodard was bringing himself 
to a decision, and in the light of a glimpse, just one 


104 RAW MATERIAL 


glimpse which I had later, I think the less I know 
about it the better for my peace of mind. The only 
information I had was contained in a very nice, con- 
ventional note from Mme. Brodard, giving me, in 
the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French 
epistolatory style, the news of their great good for- 
tune which, she said, was certainly sent by Provi- 
dence to protect her dear husband from the suffer- 
ing and hardship which would have been his with- 
out it; for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, 
very ill indeed! He had gone through a phase of 
strange mental excitement; from that he had sunk 
into melancholia which had frightened them, and in 
the end had succumbed to a mysterious malady of 
the nervous system which made him half-blind and 
almost helpless. Helpless... her wonderful, 
strong husband! What could she have done to 
care for him if it had not been for this financial 
windfall coming just when it was most needed? 
You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this 
letter. It was caused as much by learning that 
M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by learning 
about that odd business of the fortune left them. 
How strange! M. Brodard with a nervous affec- 
tion which left him in a wheel chair! It was in- 
credible. I reread the beautifully written letter, try- 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 105 


ing hard to see if anything lay between the lines. 
But there was nothing more in it than I had al- 
ready found. It was evidently written in the ut- 
most good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did 
was done with the utmost good faith. 

Some years later I was in France again and found 
myself near the address on the Riviera where the 
Brodards had purchased an estate. I had not heard 
from them in some months, but on the chance that 
they might be there, I went over from Mentone on 
a slow way-train which, returning three hours later, 
would give me time to pay my call and get back the 
same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuc- 
coed station knew where the Brodard villa was, and 
when he knew where I was going, the driver of the 
shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect for my 
destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very 
plain and rather dusty traveling-dress. We climbed 
a long hill-road to a high point, commanding a glori- 
ous view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant 
coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine 
cypress trees. 

The house was as manorial and imposing as the 
avenue leading to it and I began to be uneasily aware 
of my plain garb. As I went up the steps to the 
great door I could feel the house thrilling rhythmi- 


106 RAW MATERIAL 


cally to excellent music, and to the delicate gliding 
of many finely-shod feet. 

A servant led me to a small round salon hung 
with blue brocade, and in a moment Mme. Brodard 
came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed her- 
self luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head 
to foot was a delight to the eye. Of course she was 
very much surprised to see me, but with never a 
glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome 
of an old friend. Heér perfect good faith and good 
breeding still governed her life, it was plain to see. 
She was giving a thé dansant for the younger girls, 
she told me, adding that Madeleine had been mar- 
ried two months before to a silk manufacturer of 
Lyons. She was evidently glad to see me, but nat- 
urally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled 
what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that 
I make a visit to M. Brodard first of all and wait 
to see the others till their guests had gone. 

“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for 
a servant to show me the way, “he’ll remember you, 
of course. He will be so glad to see you. He al- 
ways liked you so much.” 

As the servant came to the door, she added with a 
note of caution. “But you must expect to find him 
sadly changed. His health does not improve, al- 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 107 


though we have a resident physician for him, and 
everything is done for him, poor dear Bernard!” 

The servant in a quiet livery of the finest ma- 
terials, led me upstairs over velvet carpets, and then 
upstairs again, to a superb room at the top of the 
house. It was all glass towards the miraculous 
living blue of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, 
books, and harmoniously designed modern furniture. 
M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred dressing- 
gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on 
his breast, his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered to- 
wards his great, wasted white hands lying empty on 
his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me, I 
could not believe that it was he . . . no, it was not 
possible! 

He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had pre- 
dicted, but the rest of her simple-hearted prophecy 
did not come true. He was not in the least glad to 
see me and made not the slightest pretense that he 
was. A look that was intolerable to see, had come into 
his eyes as he recognized me, and he had instantly 
turned his head as though he hated the sight of me. 

I knew at once that I ought to get out of 
the room, no matter how; but I was so stricken with 
horror and pity that for a moment I could not col- 
lect myself, and stood there stupidly. 


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A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhyth- 
mically in the silence. A professional-looking man 
who had been sitting with a book on the other side 
of the room got up now and, with the bored air of 
a man doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s 
thin wrist to feel the pulse. 

M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to 
me over the doctor’s head, “Well, you see how it is 
with us now.” He corrected himself. “You see how 
it is with me.” 

His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did 
not say. He had been trembling with impatience 
because I was there at all. Now he was trembling 
with impatience because I did not answer him! His 
terrible eyes dared me to answer. 

I would have done better to hold my tongue alto- 
gether, but my agitation was so great that I lost my 
head. I felt that I was called upon to bring out 
something consoling, and heard myself murmuring 
in a foolish babble something or other about possi- 
ble compensations for his illness, about his still be- 
ing able to go on with his work, to write, to publish, 
in that way to propagate his ideas... . 

At that he burst into a laugh I would give any- 
thing in the world not to have heard. 

“My ideas . . . ha! ha! ha!” he cried. 


THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 109 


Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran 
down the velvet carpets of the stairs, my hands 
over my ears. 

As I hurried along to the outside door I passed 
the salon. I saw, across the bare, gleaming desert 
of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing with a well- 
dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I 
looked, she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of 
her flexible wrist ... “smoothly, suavely... 
with an aristocratic .. .” 





FAIRFAX HUNTER 


THE erratic philanthropist of our family arrived 
from New York one spring day with a thin, sickly- 
looking, middle-aged, colored man, almost in rags. 
“This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the 
professional cheeriness of the doer of good. ‘“He’s 
pretty badly run down and needs country air. I 
thought maybe you could let him sleep in the barn, 
and work around enough for his board.” 

There was nothing professionally or in any other 
way cheery about the colored man, who stood wait- 
ing indifferently for my decision, his knees sagging, 
his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he 
raised his dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. 
I decided hastily, on impulse, from something in the 
expression of his eyes, that we could not send him 
away. 

I led him off to the barn and showed him the 
corner of the hay-mow where the children some- 
times sleep when our tiny house overflows with 
guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. 
The lids were blue and livid as though bruised. He 


cee 


112 RAW MATERIAL 


had nothing with him except the ragged clothes on 
his back. 

When I returned to the house, the philanthropist 
explained that Fairfax was a Virginia negro—“You 
could tell that from his name, of course’”—who had 
come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink, 
etc. . . . But there’s something about him. . . .” 

Yes, I agreed to that. There was something 
about him... . 

Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four 
years, the last years of his life. He was really very 
ill at first, the merest little flicker of life puffing 
uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and bones 
which was his body. The doctor said that rest and 
food were the only medicines for him. He lay like 
a piece of sodden driftwood for long hours on the 
edge of the hay where the sun caught it. 

The good-natured old Yankee woman who was 
cooking for me then, used to take him out big bowls 
of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked bread, 
and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly 
and ate. At least, she being a great gossip, did the 
chattering, and Fairfax listened, once in a while 
murmuring the soft, slow, ‘“‘Ye-e-s ’m,” which came 
to be the speech he was known by, in our valley. 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 113 


He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but 
little by little the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain 
air, and something else of which we did not dream 
till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began 
to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the 
grass around the house and, borrowing the carpen- 
tering tools, built himself a little room in the corner 
of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for 
his services about the place, and my husband gave 
him some old clothes. The next afternoon he took 
his first walk to the village, and came back with a 
pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, 
our “help,” called me to the kitchen window and 
pointed out towards the barn. On a bench before 
the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped 
back, watching the moon sink behind the mountain. 
We agreed that it looked as though he were getting 
well. 

Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, 
and Fairfax moved into the kitchen to occupy her 
place. It came out that he had once worked in a 
hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Ver- 
mont cookstove turned out Southern food, from hot 
biscuit to fried chicken. 

There is very little caste feeling in our valley, 


114 RAW MATERIAL 


and not a bit of color prejudice. Many of our people 
had never even seen a negro to speak to before they 
knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much. 

He always was very thin, but he had filled out a 
little by this time; had gone to a dentist by my ad- 
-vice and had the blackened stumps of his teeth re- 
placed by shining new ivories; had bought with his 
first wages a new suit of clothes, and was considered 
by our farmer families to be “quite a good-looking 
fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut short to 
his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and 
was always presentable. 

As a matter of course he was invited to all the 
country gatherings, like other people’s “hired help,” 
along with the rest of us. I remember the first of 
these invitations: some one telephoned from the 
village to announce a church supper, and I was 
urged, ‘“‘Do bring down a good crowd. We’ve got a 
lot of food to dispose of.” 

I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax 
not to get supper that night, as we were all going to 
the village to a church supper. 

“Yes’m,” said Fairfax. 

“T want you to be ready to start at a quarter to 
six,” I added, glancing at the clock. 

“Who, me?” said Fairfax, with a little start. 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 115 


“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you 
hear me say I wanted us all to go?” 

Fairfax looked at me searchingly, ““‘Where’ll I get 
my supper?” 

“Why, they usually have the church suppers out 
on the church green unless it rains, and then they 
go down to the basement rooms.” 

Fairfax said apathetically, ‘““No’m, they don’t 
want me.” 

I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to 
set him right, “Oh, yes, they do. You know the 
people around here haven’t any of those notions. 
Come on.” 

“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated. 

I beckoned him to follow me, went back to 
the telephone and rang up the woman who was 
arranging for the supper. ‘Do you want me to 
bring Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her ex- 
plicitly. 

“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told 
you we want a crowd.” 

After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive 
face clouded and anxious. I had a glimpse then of 
the long years of brutal discrimination through which 
he had lived, and said, feeling very much ashamed 
of my civilization, ‘““Now, Fairfax, don’t be so fool- 


116 RAW MATERIAL 


ish. We want you to go. Get on your best clothes, 
so’s to do honor to the Ladies Aid.” 

He went back to the room in the corner of the 
barn, and half an hour later came out, fresh and neat 
in his new suit, closely shaven, his slim yellow hands 
clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost 
eager, with a light in his eyes that was like a distant 
reflection of gaiety. But when we cranked up the 
Ford to go he was not in sight. We called him, and 
he answered from the barn that he was not ready, 
and would walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back 
as we rolled down the hill, ‘“Now don’t fail to come.” 

It rained on the way in, and the supper was served 
in the basement, with all the neighbors spruced up 
and fresh, while the busy women of the Ladies Aid 
rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, 
pickles, Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and 
coffee and ice-cream as from the beginning of time 
they always have; but though I kept a chair at our 
table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch 
the door, he did not appear. 

After the supper I went across the street to see 
my aunt, house-ridden with a hard cold. She told 
me that from her windows she had seen Fairfax 
come down to the village street, halt in front of the 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 117 


church, go on, turn back, halt again. She said he 
had paced back and forth in this way for half an 
hour, and finally had gone home. 

When we reached the house we found Fairfax 
there, his good clothes put away, his cook’s white 
apron tied around him, eating bread and butter and 
cold meat. 

I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had 
said. When I had finished Fairfax looked at me, 
hesitated, and said, “If it had been out of doors, 
maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression 
on his thin somber face, which made me get up 
and go away without venturing any more comment. 

As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. 
My little son was born that winter, and Fairfax was 
very fond of the baby, who soon developed the most 
extravagant fondness for his company. When spring 
came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over 
a part of that work, and had a long-running feud 
with the woodchucks who live in the edge of the 
woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint 
sight to see Fairfax in his white jacket and apron, 
sitting outside the kitchen door, peeling potatoes, a 
rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a 
stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, and 


118 RAW MATERIAL 


dart across the road to get a better sight on the lit- 
tle brown garden thieves. It did me good to see him 
stirred up enough to care about anything. 

He turned out to be a great reader and worked 
his way through most of our library. I know you 
will not believe me when I tell you who his favorite 
author was. But I am not concerned with seeming 
probable, only with telling the truth. It was Thomas 
Hardy, whose philosophy of life fitted in exactly 
with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no 
talker and rarely said anything to me beyond the 
gentle “no’m” and ‘“‘yes’m” with which he received 
orders. But once he remarked to my husband that 
Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was 
like. He went straight through that entire set of 
novels, once he had found them on the shelves, and 
all that winter my life was tinged with the con- 
sciousness of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his 
work was done, deep in communion with Hardy. 
Our visiting friends used to find the sight so curious 
as to be amusing. I did not find it so. 

The neighbors grew very used to him, and being 
sociable, friendly people, with a great deal of Yankee 
curiosity about the rest of the world, they often 
tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south. 
When he went out for a stroll in the evening, they 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 119 


would call to him, from where they were weeding a 
bed in the garden, or giving the pigs their last meal, 
“Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If 
they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax 
often accepted the invitation. As we went by in 
the car we used to see him leaning up against the 
porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman 
set out her cabbage plants. But he never went in- 
doors. 

Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one 
with a number of lively children to keep us from 
“shucking over” into middle age too soon, and the 
school-house is often the place where we gather for 
good times. The school-benches are pushed back, 
the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes up, and we all 
dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. 
Fairfax was invited as a matter of course to these 
informal affairs, and some of the children who were 
very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man, used to 
pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. 
Hunter! Dance with me!” But Fairfax only grinned 
uneasily and ‘shook his head. He used to stand 
outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully 
at the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back 
and forth in the lively old-fashioned dances, we 
could see him, a dim shape outside the window, the 


120 RAW MATERIAL 


little red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while 
from his dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the 
window was open, he came and leaned his elbows on 
the sill, nodding his head with the music, and beat- 
ing time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following 
us about as we stepped back and forth in the com- 
plicated figures. 

When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” 
some of us went out into the entry-way, and Fair- 
fax came in to help us with the uncomfortable work 
of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the 
freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at 
first, ‘“Fairfax, why don’t you go in and dance, too? 
Anybody can see you know just how to.” But his 
invariable answer, ‘“‘No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in 
it a quality which ended by silencing me. 

The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, 
but because he was a grown man, and a middle-aged 
man, they thought it not good manners for the chil- 
dren to call him by his first name, and taught the 
boys and girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought 
this perfectly natural, and none of us, entirely ig- 
norant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea of 
what this meant to him. 

Once a year, Fairfax took a two weeks’ vacation, 
and all his earnings for the year. He went off to the 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 121 


city, clean, and strong, and well-dressed; and he 
always came back without a cent, sick, and coughing, 
and shabby, with a strong smell of whiskey all over 
him. Of course, we took him severely to task for 
this inexcusable behavior, getting out for his benefit 
all the accepted axioms of conduct, prudence, ambi- 
tion, self-interest, and so on, showing him how he 
could save his money, and put it in the bank, and 
be prosperous. 

He always answered with his invariable soft, 
““Yes’m,” except on one occasion, the last year of 
his life, when he said somberly, with his soft, South- 
ern accent, “I’ve got no use for money. I can’t buy 
what I want. I’m a colored man.” 

We learned more about him ...a little... 
that he had a sister now married to a sober, hard- 
working carpenter, living in Buffalo, that he had 
lived at home with his mother till long after he was 
grown up, working in the hotel, and supporting them 
both with his wages. That was the only time I 
ever saw him show emotion. His thin face suddenly 
twisted like a child’s, and tears shone in his eyes. 
“She was an awful good woman, my mother was. 
She had a terrible time to get along when my sister 
and I were little. She never had a husband to help 
her. My father was a white man.” 


122 RAW MATERIAL 


“Fairfax, why don’t you think of marrying and 
having a home of your own?” I said impulsively. 

“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he 
asked, shortly. 

On another occasion, when I was commenting on 
the singular excellence of his writing and figuring, 
I heard about his school taught by a northern Negro, 
who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher 
after the war. It was from him that Fairfax had 
learned his correct speech, without a trace of what 
we call the Negro dialect. 

When the war in Europe came, and we decided 
to take the children and go to France we were con- 
fronted with the question of what to do with Fair- 
fax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with 
more insistence than he ever showed, and I often 
now regret that I did not try to take him. But it 
seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of 
little children in a war-ridden country, the heavier 
responsibility in a country flowing with alcohol, for 
a man with a weakness for drink. Besides, we 
could not afford the extra expense. 

There was no place for him in our region, where 
few people keep help in the kitchen. In the hurry 
and confusion of our preparations for departure I 
simply could not think of anything satisfactory to 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 123 


do in the United States of America for a proud sensi- 
tive colored man. The best I could devise was to 
find him a place with a friend, unfortunately in a 
city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty 
of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not 
think of Canada. But we knew no one in Canada. 

When we separated, he kissed the children good- 
by, seriously, and shook the hand which I held 
heartily out to him. After our last words, I said, 
making a great effort to break through the wall of 
dignified reserve which his silence built around him, 
“Fairfax, do keep straight, won’t you?” 

He looked at me with that passive, neutral look 
of his, which had to my eye an ironical color, and 
made a little gesture with his shoulders and eye- 
brows that might mean anything. 


He drank himself to death inside six months. I 
read the news in a letter from his sister, the first and 
only letter I ever had from her. I had hurried back 
to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with 
the children during an air-raid, found the American 
mail arrived, and read it to the accompaniment of 
that anti-aircraft bombardment which was so fa- 
miliar a part of the war to make the world safe for 
democracy. My letter from the country of democ- 


124 RAW MATERIAL 


racy informed me that Fairfax had died, alone, be- 
fore his sister could reach him. ‘He had been 
drinking again, I am afraid, from what they told 
me. I always felt so bad about Fairfax drinking, 
but he wouldn’t stop—he was just plain discouraged 
of life. He never touched a drop as long as our 
mother was living. He was always so sorry for our 
mother, and so good to her, though she was only a 
poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, 
and Fairfax was so smart. The teacher in our school 
wanted Fairfax to study to be a minister or a doctor, 
but he never would. He said he thought the more 
colored people try to raise themselves, the worse 
they get treated. He felt so bad, always, about the 
way colored people were treated. He said white 
folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going 
to be. I used to tell him how wrong this was, and 
how the good white people weren’t like that, but he 
didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got 
to have patience. Our mother was always patient. 
And my husband and I manage pretty well. But 
Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be 
proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how 
he liked the way the folks up your way treated him. 
He said their folks taught the white children to call 
him mister just like a white man, and that the white 


FAIRFAX HUNTER 125 


people used to ask him to parties and dances. He 
tried to go, he said, but at the door, he’d remember 
all the times when white people made a scene and 
called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near 
them on the street, and looked at him that way white 
people do. . . . if you were colored you’d know 
what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk 
it. When he was a boy and something like that 
happened, it used to make him down sick so he 
couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where 
you live, it was too late. My husband and I had 
Fairfax taken to our old home town in Virginia and 
buried there beside our mother.” 


The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. 
The noisy bombardment of hate and revenge was 
quiet. The night was as still there in France as in 
the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to 
know that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother. 


We are back in Vermont now, the curtain low- 
ered over air-raids and barrages. Everything goes 
on as before. 

The other evening we were all down at the school- 
house for an entertainment. The children spoke 
pieces, and then we had a dance. About eleven 


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o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and 
began to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors 
said, after a while, ““Do you remember how Fairfax 
used to get all dressed up so nice, and then always 
stayed around outside to watch?” 

“Yes,” I remembered. 

“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, 
“sometimes when we’re out here like this, it seems 
to me when I look up quick and glance out there in 
the dark, as though I could almost see him there 
now.” 

After a time, some one else said, “ "Twas a pity he 
never would come in.” 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 


“MASTER of the Word.” I never could remember 
where I had read that phrase—perhaps as a child 
in an old story-book about enchanters; but I knew 
whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer 
speaking to his class in the Ecole des Chartes. Not 
in any metaphorical sense, but in the plain literal 
meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. 
He made the title “Philologist”’ put on purple and 
gold. 

The sallow young seminarists in their scant black 
gowns, keen, pale, young students who had come 
from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland, sat 
motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him un- 
waveringly for the two long hours of these daily 
lectures. Words were the living creatures in that 
room. They were born before our eyes in the re- 
mote childhood of the race, and swept down through 
the ages till there they were in- our own language, 
issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic re- 
minder that all the days of our lives were no more » 
than an hour in the existence of those disembodied 


and deathless sounds. 
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From his youth the vigorous old man had trans- 
ferred all his life to the world of words—and had 
found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure and 
lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From 
inside the walls of his safe refuge he watched the 
world outside suffer and despair and cry out and 
die. And he marveled at its folly. He himself knew 
none of these fitful moods. He was always of a 
steady, kind, and humorous cheerfulness, and al- 
ways the most compelling of talkers. No impas- 
sioned orator declaiming on an emotional theme could 
hold more breathlessly attentive his listeners than 
this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when in his rapid 
conversational staccato he traced out the life of a 
word, told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the 
mouths of men, so much less able to withstand death 
and time than this mere breath from out their 
mouths. He did this not with the straining effort of 
the orator, but as naturally as he breathed or 
thought. His mind was constantly revolving such 
cycles, and when he spoke he was but thinking 
aloud, always with the same zest, day after day, al- 
ways alert, with never a flagging of interest, with 
never a moment of treacherous wonder about the 
value of anything. I knew him when I was passing 
through one of those passions of doubt which mark 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 129 


one’s entry into adult life, and I never could be 
done with marveling at him. I was grateful to him, 
too, for he showed the most amused sympathetic 
kindliness to the foreign girl, groping her way for- 
ward. 

I think he was sorry for me, for any one tempted 
to step into human and prosaic life. He stood at 
the door of his ordered, settled, established life, and 
called to me to construct one like it, to do as he had 
done, to turn away from the sordid comedy of per- 
sonality, and step into the blessed country of im- 
personal intellectual activity. Many things turned 
me toward his path: the great weight of his mature 
personality (he was over seventy then and I was 
twenty), my immense admiration for his learning, 
my interest in his subject, my intuitive dread of the 
guessed-at strain of human emotions. You must 
not think that his world was austere or rarefied. 
He had found there, with no penalties to pay, all the 
amusement, the drama, the struggle, the rewards, 
the entertainment, which men find in the human 
world, and pay for so dearly. He never knew a 
bored or listless moment in his life, nor did any one 
in his company. 

Every Tuesday and Thursday, after that two- 
hour lecture to the seminarists, there was a half 


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hour intermission before the next class—eight or ten 
advanced students—met in his oak-paneled, half- 
basement office, rich with precious books, to discuss 
with him a curious Old-French manuscript which 
he had discovered in the library at Cassel. 

I have never in my life known anything more 
sparkling and stimulating than those half-hour in- 
termissions. ‘The old man always clapped on his 
hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his 
long legs to a stride which kept me trotting like a 
little dog at his side, started up the Boulevard St. 
Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which 
calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall 
form showed in the distance, and the inimitable, 
high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of his voice could 
be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses 
bestirred herself—for the pastry-shop was proud of 
its famous patron. She always had babas au rhum 
waiting for us, as this was the only pastry Professor 
Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like babas 
au rhum myself, but who was I to set up my insig- 
nificant opinion against so greata man? SoJI ate the 
wet sop docilely, considering it a small price to pay 
for the stories that went with it, stories that blew 
the walls away from around us, and spread there 
the rich darkness of the Middle Ages. There were 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 131 


stories out of medieval manuscripts as yet unattri- 
buted and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of 
the Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, un- 
classified and unarranged of the Bodleian, which 
Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor; of 
priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by 
incredible coincidences; of years of fruitless work 
on an obscure passage in the Grail-cycle, suddenly 
cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had 
discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible. 

Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the 
waitresses adored and hoped for, he would begin 
juggling with the names of things about us, the trim 
shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the 
ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotech- 
nic display of laughing erudition, would hunt those 
words around and around through all the languages 
where they had tarried for a time, back through his- 
tory—the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark 
Ages, Late Latin, the Empire—till they ended in the 
long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant of an early 
Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered 
with a total disregard of onlookers. 

After one of these flights, we came to ourselves 
with a start, looking around with astonishment at 
our everyday dress and surroundings and bodies. 


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Or perhaps it was a story out of his life, his long, 
long life, of which not a day had been lost from his 
work. My favorites, I remember, were the Tarascon 
stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was 
a very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in 
the study of Old French, the municipal authorities 
of Tarascon employed him to come and decipher the 
Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning 
of time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with 
the abbreviations, conventional signs, and hand- 
writings of the past centuries, wholly unintelligible 
to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant 
spent a whole winter there, studying and copying 
out these manuscripts, a first experience of the in- 
tense, bright pleasure such work was to give him all 
his life long. ‘The quick-hearted southerners in the 
town, loving change and novelty, delighted to see the 
young, new face among them, welcomed him with 
meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours 
with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He 
made friends there whom he never forgot, and every 
year after that he made the long trip to Tarascon 
to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. 
But he lived long, much longer than the quickly- 
consumed southerners, and one by one, the friends 
of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion. 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 133 


They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those 
men used up by the fever of living, and they fell 
away from the side of the vigorous man who had 
chosen for his own the unchanging world of the in- 
tellect. “And finally, last year,’ said Professor 
Meyer on one occasion, ‘‘when I went back, they 
were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the ceme- 
tery to have a visit with them.” 

As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken 
matter-of-factness of his tone, no self-pity in it, he 
went on, his voice brightening into enthusiasm, “So 
I went and had another look at the town records. 
Such a glorious collection of scripts. Not one 
known style missing!” 

He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved 
Gaston Paris, his great colleague at the College de 
France, whose name was always linked with his in 
the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, 
but his lamentations were over the work unfinished, 
the priceless manuscripts yet unedited. When the 
news came of the tragic family disgrace of one of the 
greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, 
Paul Meyer was moved almost to tears. They were 
not of sympathy with the sorrow of the other 
scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially 
one filled with irreplaceable knowledge of his sub- 


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ject, could let so ephemeral a thing as human rela- 
tions distract him from the rich fields to be tilled in 
the kingdom of words. 

During the second trial of Dreyfus, Paul Meyer 
was called to testify as a handwriting expert and 
gave his testimony in favor of Dreyfus, the evidence, 
he said, being unmistakable. It was at the height 
of the Dreyfus re-trial, when all France was throb- 
bing with hate and suspicion like an ulcer throbbing 
with fever. Professor Meyer was abominably 
treated by the opposition, attacked in the streets, in- 
sulted, boycotted, his classes filled with jeering 
young men who yelled him down when he tried to 
speak. His bearing through this trial is one of the 
momentous impressions of my life. He did not re- 
sent it, he made no effort to resist it, he struck no 
melodramatic attitude, as did many of the fine men 
then fighting for justice in France. He smothered 
the flame out, down to the last spark by his total 
disregard of it. What did he care for howling fana- 
tics in one camp or another? Nothing! He had 
been asked to pass judgment on a piece of hand- 
writing and he had done it. There was nothing more 
to be said. 

I cannot forget the slightest shade of his expres- 
sion as he stood one day, on the platform of his 


ee ae ee 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 135 


classroom, chalk in hand, ready to write out an out- 
line on the blackboard, waiting, while the yelling 
crowd of “manifestants,’ mostly young men in flow- 
ing black neckties, with straggling attempts at 
beards on their pimply faces, stamped and hooted 
and shrieked out, “Dirty Jew! What were you 
paid? Shut up! Shut up! What was your price, 
dirty Jew?” and other things less printable. And 
yet, although I can shut my eyes now and see that 
harsh, big-nosed, deeply-lined old face, with the 
small, bright eyes under the bristling white eye- 
brows, I can not think of any words to describe its 
expression—not scornful, not actively courageous, 
not resentful, not defiant; rather the quiet, unex- 
cited, waiting look of a man in ordinary talk who 
waits to go on with what he has to say until a pound- 
ing truck of iron rails has time to pass the windows. 
He stood looking at his assailants, the chalk ready 
in his bony fingers, and from him emanated so pro- 
found a sense of their entire unimportance, of the 
utterly ephemeral quality of their emotion compared 
to the life of the consonant he was about to discuss, 
that little by little they were silenced. Their furi- 
ous voices flattened out to an occasional scream 
which sounded foolish even to their own ears. They 
looked at each other, got up in a disorderly body 


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and stamped out of the room. The last one might 
have heard Professor Meyer’s high, squeaky voice 
stating, ““Thus in Picardy and in the north of Nor- 
mandy, Latin C before a did not undergo the change 
noted in other provinces, and we still find it pro- 
nounced)? 

The pale, keen seminarists in their long, black 
gowns, and the American girl, whipped out their 
notebooks and were at once caught up into the 
Paul-Meyer world where no storms blew. 

When, three or four years after the beginning of 
this friendship—it was not precisely that, but 
I cannot think of another name to call it—l 
made my final choice and stepped out of his safe, 
windless realm into human life, it was with some 
apprehension that I went to tell him that I was en- 
gaged to be married and would study Philology no 
more. I might have known better than to be ap- 
prehensive. What did he care? What was one 
more or less among the disciples of Philology, as 
long as the words were there? Also, he laughingly 
refused to consider my decision as final. He seemed 
to stand at the door of Philology, calling after me 
with perfect good humor, as I walked away, “‘When 
you’re tired of all that, come back. I’m always 
here;”? 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 137 


In the years after this, whenever we passed 
through Paris I went to see him, stepping back into 
my girlhood as I stepped over the threshold of the 
Ecole des Chartes. Professor Meyer was very old 
now, but showed not the slightest sign of weakness 
or infirmity. One evening when I went hurriedly 
to say good-by before we sailed for home, I found 
him in his study, in that rich, half-basement room, 
lined with books. The green-shaded lamp burned 
clear and steady as though there were no wind in 
the world to shake a flame. The gray, plain, old 
man looked up from the yellow parchment he was 
deciphering, and in a sudden gust I had a new reve- 
lation of the insatiability of the human heart. I 
was a complete, fulfilled, vigorous woman, a happy 
wife, a writer beginning to feel an intoxicating in- 
terest in creative work, joyously awaiting the birth 
of my first child; but I knew for an instant there, 
the bitterest envy of the lot of the old scholar, half 
buried though he was in the earth, safe in the in- 
finite security of his active brain. 

The last time I saw him was two years later. We 
had been in Italy and were to pass through Paris on 
the way home. My little daughter was eighteen 
months old, a mere baby still, and I wrote Professor 
Meyer to ask him if he could not for once reverse 


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the usual procedure and come to see me. He an- 
swered, setting a day, and informing me that he had 
been and still was very ill. “I will give you details 
when I see you.” 

When he came into the room I was shocked at 
his appearance, and horrified when he told me what 
had happened to him. He had been as usual in the 
summer, at Oxford, delving in the unclassified 
treasures of the Bodleian, and had started home. 
The Channel steamer arrived late at night at Bou- 
logne, and he had chosen to sleep there, instead of 
taking the night train to Paris. 

He had gone to sleep apparently in his usual 
health, but when he woke up in the morning he had 
lost his control of words. He could not bring them 
into the simplest order. He could not command a 
single one to his use. He could not say who he was, 
nor where he wanted to go, although he knew these 
facts perfectly. The moment he tried to speak, 
there swooped down between him and his meaning, 
a darkening throng of words. All the words in the 
world were there, Greek, Sanscrit, Provengal, Ital- 
ian, Old-French, tearing furiously through his mind. 
But not the simple words in his own language to say 
that he was Professor Paul Meyer of the Ecole des 
Chartes, who wanted to buy a ticket to Paris. He 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 139 


stood there, helpless, facing the staring chamber- 
maids, cut off from them, from every one by this 
wild, invisible storm. They thought him an idiot, 
escaped from his friends, and ran away from him. 
As he told me about it, he looked sick and gray, 
and the sweat stood out on his forehead. 

It had lasted for three days. For three days and 
three nights he had felt himself drowning in words, 
words that flooded up about him so that he was 
fighting for air. Never for an instant was he able 
to take his attention from their crazy flight through 
his mind, and never able to stop one long enough to 
use it. He suffered, suffered more than he had 
thought any human being could and retain con- 
sciousness, had after the first day fallen into a high 
fever, so that they feared for his life. Hour after 
hour he had lain on his bed, helpless, trying with all 
his strength to fight away those words long enough 
to remember what he wished to say. 

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, click! 
Something snapped into place inside his mind, and 
there he was, very worn, very weak, but perfectly 
himself again, Professor Paul Meyer of the Ecole 
des Chartes. He had reached home safely, though 
strengthless and exhausted, and the next morning 
had wakened again to that horror. It had lasted 


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an hour then, but it had come twice since—once as 
he was lecturing before his class! 

He never knew when it might be upon him. As 
he opened his mouth to speak at any moment, he 
could not be sure that words would not burst from 
his command again. Even as he told me this, he 
glanced at my baby daughter, whom I had brought 
out to show him. For an instant his face whitened 
in so terrible a glare of panic that I screamed and 
clutched his arm. It was over. He was drawing a 
long breath and wiping his shaking lips with his 
handkerchief. ‘For an instant as I looked at her 
I could not think of the word ‘baby,’ ” he said piti- 
fully. “It was there, waiting to come on me again.” 

It seemed to me that he was not fit to go about 
the streets alone, and when he started to go away I 
asked him if he would not like to have me take him 
home. He hung his proud old head and said noth- 
ing. I went to get my hat and as no one happened 
to be at home with whom to leave the baby, I took 
her on my arm. 

We went silently through the familiar Paris 
streets, the stooping old man towering on one. side 
of me, the rosy baby heavy on my shoulder. When 
we reached his door, his concierge saw us and came 
out to meet us, nodding knowingly to me, and behind 


PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER I4I 


his back, tapping her forehead. I took his great 
bony old hand for a last clasp and said good-by. He 
went away up the stairs led by the concierge. 


Three months after this I read in a newspaper a 
cabled notice of the death of the distinguished 
scholar, M. Paul Meyer, founder and for many years 
head of the Ecole des Chartes. He died, so the no- 
tice said, “from an obscure form of aphasia.” 





pete Als LEIP, GODS). <<’ 


“W hile all the gods Olympus’ summit crowned, 
Looking from high to see the wondrous sight.” 
ILIAD, XXII. 
I was spading up the earth in the dahlia-bed, when 
the children came up, a shouting band of them, just 
out of school, and noticed that the angleworms 
were “out.” This first, indubitable sign of spring in 
Vermont always suggests to adolescent Vermonters 
the first fishing expedition. But ten-year-olds and 
under think of the early brood of first-hatched 
chicks. 

“Hey, Jimmy, angleworms!’ 

“Carl, run get a can!” 

“Here’s a fat one!” 

They swooped down on me and squatted along the 
edge of the spaded earth, pecking and snatching and 
chattering like a flock of sparrows. As I spaded 
on, I heard bits of their talk, ‘““Won’t the chicks just 
love them!” ‘First worms those chicks ever saw.” 
“No, Carl, that’s too few, let’s wait till we get a lot. 
It’s such fun to drop in a whole bunch.” ‘They love 
angleworms so!” 

143 


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Then I heard the inevitable fanciful suggestion 
from the imaginative one of the group, “I bet we 
seem to the chicks just like giants . . . no, giants 
are always mean .. . like gods.” 

They fell on this idea, chattering and snatching, 
as they had at the worms: “Let’s be gods! I'll be 


Jupiter.” 
“T want to be Mars.” 
“Loki! Loki!” 


“T want to be Thor!” 

“No, J want to be Thor!” 

“T was just going to be Thor, myself!” 

Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They 
trooped off to the poultry-yard, still disputing the 
question. 

When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a 
group of exasperated gods hung over the low wire- 
netting, gesticulating and crying out on the idiocy 
of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from 
their babbling account I made out that the chicks 
had acted just as chicks always act and always have 
acted from the beginning of time. } 

The gods had proudly put down in the midst of 
the little world of their beneficiaries the mass of 
angleworm wealth which they had gathered with 
such good intentions of giving pleasure. 


“WHILE ALL THE GODS...” 145 


“All they had to do was to pitch right in and en- 
joy themselves,” cried Jupiter, wrathfully. 

And what had they done? Well, first of all they 
had been afraid, running to look at the squirming 
heap of treasure, peeping shrilly in agitation, and 
running frantically away with fluttering wings and 
hearts. 

The circle of omnipotents, hanging over the wire- 
netting had been able to endure this foolishness with 
an approach to the necessary god-like toleration of 
the limitations of a lesser race. One of the Thors, 
it seemed, the six-year-old-one, had tried to hurry 
up the progress of the race, by catching one of his 
pin-headed charges and holding him firmly in a 
benevolent small hand, directly in front of the de- 
licious food, “where he couldn’t elp seeing how 
good it was, seems ’s if,” explained Thor Number 
Three, to me. 

But the chick had, it appeared, been perfectly 
capable of not seeing how good it was, because his 
mind was entirely taken up with his terror at being 
held. He had merely emitted one frenzied screech 
of horror after another till the other chicks began to 
run about and screech too, and the older, more ex- 
perienced gods had sharply told young Thor that 
he didn’t know so much about this god-business as 


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he thought he did, and that experience had told 
them the only thing to do was to let the chicks alone 
till they got used to a new idea. That always took 
forever, they informed their young colleague. 

So after this they had waited and waited and 
waited, while the chicks fluttered, and peeped and 
ran away from what they really wanted above every- 
thing; from what the gods had so kindly put there 
for them to enjoy. 

“Gee whiz!” said Mars disdainfully. ‘‘Wouldn’t 
you think they’d know enough for that! ‘There 
was room for every last one of them to stand around 
the pile, and eat all they wanted, without stirring a 
toe.” 

Finally, one bold adventurer had struck his beak 
experimentally into the pile, pulled out a tasty piece 
of meat, and turned aside to gobble it down. 

And then what? 

Did the other chicks follow his sensible example 
and begin at last to profit by their opportunity. 

“No! no! no!” A chorus of all the gods assured 
me that nothing like that had happened. Instead, 
with shrill twitters of excitement, all the twenty or 
more chicks had thrown themselves on that one, to 
wrest his bit from him. 

“Honest to goodness, they did/” Loki affirmed to 


“WHILE ALL THE GODS...” 147 


me, passionately, as if feeling that I could not pos- 
sibly believe in such unreason if I had not seen it. 

The chick with the worm had taken to his heels, 
unable to swallow his prize because of the hunt 
against him. Up and down the little world of their 
yard, he had run frantically, wildly, and silently 
(because of his mouth being full). And up and 
down, wildly, frantically and vociferously (their 
mouths being empty) his fellow-chicks had pursued 
him, bent on catching him and taking away from 
him whatever it was he prized enough to try to pos- 
sess. As he turned and doubled to escape them, 
they turned and doubled in a pack, slipping, 
falling, and trampling on each other in their blind 
fury. 

Presently, ‘““‘What do you think!” cried the oldest 
of the Thors. “He got so rattled that he lost his piece 
of worm out of his mouth, but the others didn’t give 
him time to tell them that. Anyhow, they’d yelled 
and carried on so, they had him up in the air. He 
didn’t know by that time what he was doing; and he 
kept on legging it as hard as ever, and they after 
him.” 

By and by, this insane flight and agitation had 
so exhausted them all that they were staggering 
feebly on their tiny legs, and unable to emit more 


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than hoarse squawks as they ran. Then, apparently 
by chance, as he darted zigzag to and fro, he had 
run under a corner of the brooder. Instantly ... 
ah-h-h, the grateful warmth and darkness had sug- 
gested rest to his weary soul; with a long murmured 
“che-e-eep” of utter relief, he had settled down 
against the wall of the brooder to close his eyes. 
And each of his pursuers, as they dashed in after 
him, had seized on the Heaven-sent opportunity for 
rest after the terrible tension of the struggle for 
existence, imposed on them by a cruel fate, and had 
with a sigh and a relieved, whispered twitter, given 
himself over to sleep and dreams. | 

At the time when I came up, every chick was 
sound asleep in the brooder, while outside in the 
middle of their world, lay the untouched pile of 
angleworms, bare and open to view under the 
bright spring sky. 

“Can you beat it!” said Mars contemptuously. 

He turned away from such unimaginable imbecil- 
ity to a new idea, “Say, kids!” he bellowed, although 
they were all within touching distance of him, “lets 
be cops and robbers!” 

They flared up like tinder to a spark, “‘All right! 
Ill be Chief of Police!” 

“T’ll be a detective!” 


“WHILE ALL THE GODS...” — 149 


“T’ll be the robber captain . . . cave’s under the 
hay, as usual.” 

“No, 7 wanted to be robber captain!” 

“No, me, me!” 

They all wanted to be robber captain, it seemed. 
They streamed away to the barn, wrangling over 
this. 


All but one. The youngest Thor, newer than the 
others to the god-business, still hung over the wire- 
netting, grieving, ‘Seems ’s if . . . if we could only 
tell them! ‘They Jove angleworms so!”’ he said pity- 
ingly. “If I could only think of some way to teach 
them how to stand around quietly, and each one get 
all he wanted to. They’d have such a good time!” 
he yearned over them. 

As I said nothing, he asked of the world in gen- 
eral, “Why won’t they? Oh, why won’t they?” 

I let fall insidiously, “I wonder how the angle- 
worms like it?” The little god stared at me with 
startled eyes; and then at the worms. He looked 
at them as though he saw them for the first time. 
His tender young face was fairly vacant with his 
surprise before a new idea. 

Then he began slowly to climb over the wire- 
netting. 


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When I went back to the dahlia-bed, he was care- 
fully burying the angleworms again. 

His young face wore an expression of puzzled be- 
wilderment. 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 


WHEN the elders of our family could think of noth- 
ing else to worry about they put in their time to 
good advantage on little Cousin Maria Pearl Man- 
ley. Yes—Maria Pearl—that was really the poor 
child’s name, given in baptism. You can see that 
her troubles began early. That name was symboli- 
cal of what her life was to be, sharply divided be- 
tween her mother’s family (they were the ones who 
insisted on the Maria) and her father’s folks, who 
stood out for the Pearl. Her father had died before 
she was born, and her mother lived only a few 
months after the baby came, and was so mortally ill 
that no one thought of naming the poor little girl. 
It was after her mother’s death, when the two hos- 
tile families could collect themselves, that the long 
struggle over the child began by giving her that 
name. 

Thereafter she was Maria for six months of the 
year, the period when she stayed with the Purdons; 
and Pearl the other half-year, when she was with 
her father’s family, the Manleys. ‘The poor little 


I5I 


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tyke, not even a fixed name of her own,” my grand- 
mother used to say, pitying the child’s half-yearly 
oscillations between those two utterly dissimilar 
houses “where there’s nothing the way it should be 
in either one!” The circle of compassionate elders 
used to continue, “Dear, dear! What can the poor 
little thing ever learn, with such awful examples al- 
ways before her eyes.” 

As I look back now, I must admit that such severe 
characterizations were really not due to the natural 
tendency of all elders to be sure that children are 
being badly brought up. ‘Those two houses which 
formed the horizon of Maria Pearl’s life were cer- 
tainly extravagant examples of how not to conduct 
life. The Purdon grandfather and grandmother and 
aunt were the strictest kind of church people (the 
kind who make you want to throw a brick through 
the church-windows), narrow, self-righteous, Old- 
Testament folks, who dragged little Maria (the 
“Pearl” was never pronounced inside their doors) 
to Church and Sunday-School and prayer-meeting 
and revivals and missionary meetings, and made her 
save all her pennies for the heathen. Not that she 
had very many to save, for the Purdons, although 
very well-to-do, were stingier than any other family 
in town. They loved money, it tore at the very 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 153 


fibers of their being to part with it, and they avoided 
this mental anguish with considerable skill. Al- 
though their competent “management” allowed them 
to live comfortably, there were few occasions which 
brought them to the point of letting any actual cash 
out of their hands. The dark, plain, well-fitting 
garments which clothed little Maria were never 
bought, but made over out of her grandmother’s 
clothes; the soap which kept her clothes immacu- 
lately clean had cost no money, but was part of the 
amazing household economies in which old Mrs. 
Purdon was expert and into which she introduced 
Maria with conscientious care. The child learned 
to darn and patch and how to make soap out of 
left-over bits of fat, and how to use the apple-culls 
for jelly and how, year after year, to retrim last 
season’s hat for this. 

From morning till night she lived in a close, air- 
less round of intensive housekeeping and thriit. 
She spread newspapers down over the rugs, so the 
sun should not fade them; she dried every scrap of 
orange peel to use as kindling, she saved the dried 
beef jars to use for jams, she picked berries all day 
long instead of playing, and then sat up late with 
Aunt Maria and Grandmother, picking them over 
and canning them, on the stove in the woodshed, to 


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avoid litter in the kitchen. She always wore ging- 
ham aprons, even to school, which no other children 
did, and she was treated as though she had offended 
against the Holy Ghost, if she forgot to wash her 
rubbers and put them in their place in the closet 
under the stairs. She was rigorously held to a per- 
fect performance of her share of the housework, 
making up her bed with the fear of the Lord in her 
poor little heart lest the corners be not square 
enough, poking desperately at the corner of the 
windows she washed and polished, and running her 
finger anxiously over the dishes she wiped to be sure 
they had that glass-smooth surface which only re- 
peated rinsings in very hot water can give. Then 
when all was done, her reward was to take her seat 
in their appallingly neat sitting-room and, to the ac- 
companiment of Aunt Maria’s reading aloud out of a 
church paper, to set tiny stitches in the stout, un- 
bleached cotton of which her underwear was made. 
They were really dreadful, the six months she passed 
with her mother’s people. 

But the other half-year was scarcely better, al- 
though she might have journeyed to another planet 
with less change in her surroundings. When the day 
came, the first of January, for her departure from 
the Purdon household, her solidly-constructed little 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 155 


trunk was filled with her solidly-constructed little 
clothes, her hair was once more rebraided to an 
even harder finish, her face was once more polished 
with the harsh, home-made soap, and her nails were 
cut to the quick. “It’s the last time the poor child 
will have any decent care, till she comes back,” 
Grandmother Purdon would say bitterly, buttoning 
up with exactitude the stout, plain warm little coat, 
and pulling down over Maria’s ears the firmly knit 
toque of dark-blue wool. They all went down to 
the station to make sure she took the right train, 
and put her, each of them separately, in the hands 
of the Conductor. They kissed her good-by, all but 
Grandfather, who shook hands with her hard. It 
was at that moment that Maria’s frozen little heart 
felt a faint warmth from the great protecting affec- 
tion they had for her, which underlay the rigor 
of their training and which they hid with such tragic 
completeness. 

The first day of the arrival at the Manley’s was 
always a dream of delight! To emerge from the 
silent rigidity of the Purdon house into the cheerful, 
easy-going, affectionate noise of the Manley home, 
to exchange the grim looks of Grandmother Purdon 
for the exuberant caresses of Grandmother Manley; 
to leave behind all stringent admonitions to put your 


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wraps on a certain hook, and to be allowed to fling 
them down on the floor where you stood. . . . Little 
Pearl (she was never called Maria by the Manleys) 
felt herself rebounding into all the sunshine and 
good-nature, as a rubber ball rebounds from a hard 
stone wall. She flung herself around Aunt Pearl’s 
neck, and paid back with interest the “forty thou- 
sand kisses” which were the tradition in that home. 
She flung herself into play with the innumerable lit- 
tle cousins, who cluttered up the floor; for there was _ 
always a married aunt or two back home, with her 
family, while an invisible uncle-by-marriage tried 
somewhere in a vague distance, to get a hypothetical 
job. She flung herself into her bed at night joyfully 
reveling in the fact that its corners were not turned 
squarely, and that the pillow-case had last seen the 
wash-tub on about the same date that Aunt Carry’s 
husband had last had a job. It was a care-free 
dream to go to bed whenever she pleased—eleven 
o’clock if that suited her taste—with nobody to tell 
her to wash, or to brush her teeth, or comb her hair; 
and to lie there watching Aunt Carry and Aunt Pearl, 
who always sat up till midnight at least, putting 
their hair in curl-papers and talking about the way 
the neighbor next door treated his wife. This was 
life! 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 157 


But already the very next morning the dream was 
not quite so iridescent, as with no one to wake her, 
she opened her eyes at twenty minutes of nine, and 
knew that she had to be at school at nine! She 
sprang up, shivering in the cold room (Grandfather 
Manley never could manage the furnace, and also 
there were periods when there was mighty little 
money to buy coal) and started to claw herself into 
her clothes. But always just at first she forgot the 
Manley ways, and neglected to collect everything 
she had taken off, and put it under her pillow, the 
only spot in which you could keep things for your- 
self in that comfortably communistic family. Her 
shoes were gone, her nice new calf-skin school shoes. 
She went flying out, comb in hand, tearing at the tan- 
gles in her hair, as she went, asking if anybody had 
seen her shoes. Aunt Carry, still in her nightgown, 
with a smeary baby in her arms, said, yes, she’d let 
her Elmer have them to run down to the grocery 
store to get some bread. Somehow they’d got out 
of bread and poor Aunt Pearl had had to go off to 
her work with only some crackers to eat. Surely lit- 
tle Pearl didn’t grudge the loan of her shoes to her 
cousin. The bread was for all of them, and Elmer 
couldn’t find his shoes, and anyhow one of them had 
a big hole in it and the snow was deep. 


158 RAW MATERIAL 


“But, Aunt Carry, how can I get to school? I'll 
be late!” 

“Well, gracious, what if you are! Don’t be so 
fussy! Time was made for slaves!” That was 
Aunt Carry’s favorite motto, which she was always 
citing, and for citing which there were plenty of 
occasions in her life. Little Pearl thought some- 
what resentfully, as she rummaged in her trunk for 
her other shoes, that if Aunt Carry had to enter the 
school-room late and get scolded, she’d think differ- 
ently about time! But anyhow it was fun to wear 
her best shoes if she liked, and to watch their patent 
leather tips twinkling as she scurried about. They 
twinkled very fast during that quarter of an hour, 
as Pearl collected her wraps (her mittens she never 
did find after that day) and tried to scare up some- 
thing for breakfast in the disordered kitchen, where 
the cat, installed on the table, was methodically get- 
ting a breakfast by licking the dirty plates clean. 
Pearl was not so lucky, and had to go off to school 
with a cracker in one hand and a piece of marsh- 
mallow cake in the other. The less said about her 
hair the better! Grandmother Manley’s “forty 
thousand kisses” were not quite so wonderful this 
morning as they had been last night. 

At noon Pearl ran home, her stomach in her heels, 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 159 


all one voracious demand for good food. Aunt 
Carry was crocheting by the window and there was 
no sign of any lunch. “Mercy me!” cried Grand- 
mother Manley, “Is it noon? Why, how the morn- 
ing has gone!” And then with the utmost compunc- 
tion they both rushed out into the kitchen and be- 
gan to hurry with all their might to get something 
for Pearl to eat. The kitchen fire was pretty low, 
and there were no potatoes cooked, and Aunt Carry 
had forgotten to order any eggs, and the milk bottle 
had been left outside and was frozen hard. Hurry 
as they might and apologize to Pearl almost with 
tears as they did, it was very little that Pearl had 
eaten when she went back to school, and she knew 
well enough that they would forget tomorrow, just 
as they had to-day. No, already Pearl felt that life 
could not be made wholly out of kisses and good 
nature. By nightfall, her thin kid shoes were rather 
scuffed and very wet, with a break in one of the 
patent leather tips where Cousin Tom had stepped 
on it, in a scuffle with his brother. Little Pearl 
nursed her sore toe and broken shoe with a weary 
feeling. 

Always at the end of the six months with the 
Manleys, Pearl was nearly a nervous wreck. She 
was behind in her lessons, since there was not a quiet 


160 RAW MATERIAL 


spot in the house to study, and even if there had 
been you couldn’t escape from the noise of the trom- 
bone, which Aunt Carry’s oldest was learning to 
play; she was underweight and anemic for lack 
of regular food and enough sleep ... it wasn’t 
much use to go to bed when nobody else did, and 
Aunt Pearl and Aunt Carry always visited in more 
than audible voices as they put up their hair in 
curlers; she had nothing to wear (since nothing had 
been renewed or mended) except a blue silk dress 
which Grandfather Manley had bought for her in a 
fit of affection, and some mostly-lace underwear 
which Aunt Carry had sat up till all hours making 
for her, so that “she should have something pretty 
like the other girls!” But for an active little girl, 
mostly-lace underwear soon was reduced to the qual- 
ity of mosquito netting; and a blue silk dress in the 
Manley’s house was first cousin to Sir Walter Ra- 
leigh’s cloak in the mud-puddle. 

With all the family she had been night after night 
to the moving pictures and not infrequently was 
kept up afterwards by the hysterics of little Nelly, 
Aunt Carry’s nervous, high-strung five-year-old, who 
saw men with revolvers pointed at her, and despera- 
does about to bind and gag her, till Pearl more 
than half saw them too, and dreamed of them after- 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 161 


wards. She had suffered the terrible humiliation of 
having the teacher send her home with a note say- 
ing that her hair must be washed and kept in better 
order, a humiliation scarcely lessened by the out- 
raged affection of the Manleys, who had taken her 
into their loving arms, to moan over their darling’s 
hurt feelings. She had thereafter made frantic ef- 
forts to keep her own hair in order, with what brush 
and comb she could salvage out of the jetsam in the 
room which was at once hers and the aunts’ bed- 
room; but if she complained that her hair-ribbons 
disappeared, or were crumpled in a corner of the 
drawer, she was told comfortably, not to be fussy, 
“For goodness’ sakes, don’t make such a fuss 
about things! Folks that do never have a minute’s 
comfort in life, nor nobody else in the house 
either.” 

Yes, it was a rather pale, wild-eyed little Pearl, 
who on the first day of July scrambled together 
into her trunk what she could find, put on the hat 
which had been so bright and pretty when Aunt 
Pearl gave it to her at Easter, and which now after 
two months with the Manleys looked like a floor- 
cloth. She did not put her hands over her ears to 
deaden a little the volume of noise as they all 
crowded about her in the station to say their affec- 


162 RAW MATERIAL 


tionate and vociferous good-byes, but that was only 
because she did not want to hurt their feelings. The 
instant she was in the train, she always hid her face 
in her arms, quivering all over with nervous tension. 
Oh, the noise the Manleys always made over every- 
thing, and the confusion they were always in, when 
they tried to do anything, colliding with each other, 
and dropping things, and squealing and screaming! 
And it was all right for them to be warm-hearted 
and generous—but when they slathered money on 
ice-cream, and then didn’t have enough to pay for 
her ticket, till they’d borrowed it... ! 

Well, then there was the re-entrance into the Pur- 
don house, the beautiful, fragrant cleanliness of 
everything, the dustless order, her own room, with 
the clean, white sheets, and her own safe closet into 
which nobody would ever plunge rummaging. And 
Aunt Maria so quiet and calm, with her nice low 
voice, and Grandmother Purdon so neat with her 
white lace collar, and her lovely white hair so well- 
brushed, and oh, the good things to eat.... To 
sit down to a well-ordered table, with a well-cooked 
savory mutton stew, and potatoes neither watery nor 
underdone, and clear apple jelly quivering in a glass 
dish! And the clean, clean dishes! Had Maria ever 
complained of having to rinse the dishes too often! 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 163 


She remembered the dried-on bits of food always to 
be felt on the Manley plates... ! 

The first evening too was always dream-like, the 
quiet, deft despatching of the dishes, in the kitchen 
shining with cleanliness, and then all the evening 
free, and so quiet, so blessedly quiet, with no trom- 
bone, and no whoops of chatter or boisterous cry- 
ing and laughing; no piano banging (except perhaps 
Aunt Maria softly playing a hymn or two) no chil- 
dren overturning chairs and slamming doors, no one 
falling up or downstairs, no crash of breaking 
crockery from the kitchen . . . little Maria sat on 
the well-swept porch behind the well-trained vines 
and soaked herself in the peace and quiet. 

But by the next morning, the shine was a little off. 
When Aunt Maria came to wake her at half past 
six, half past six . . . why, no one at Grandfather 
Manley’s thought of stirring till eight! And she 
was expected to wash and dress .. . not a button 
unbuttoned or a hair out of place under penalty of 
a long lecture on neatness . . . and “do” her room, 
even to wiping off the woodwork; and make her 
bed. Heavens! How fussy they were about those 
old corners! All this before she had a bit of break- 
fast. Then, breakfast with everybody’s whole soul 
fixed on the work to be done, and nobody so much 


164. RAW MATERIAL 


as dimly aware that it was a glorious, sunny, windy, 
summer day outside. Maria’s heart sank, sank, 
sank, as she drank her perfectly made chocolate, 
and ate her golden-brown toast, till it struck the dis- 
mal level where it usually lived during the Purdon 
half-year. ‘Come, Maria, don’t loiter over your 
food. The only way to get the work done is to go 
right at it!” 

“Oh, Maria, do you call that folding your napkin? 
I call it crumpling it into a ball.” 

“You forgot to put your chair back against the 
wall, Maria. If we each do faithfully our share of 
what is to be done, it will be easier for us all.” 

“No, the spoons go there . . . mercy, no! not 
the forks!” 

“Don’t twitch the curtain so as you go by. It 
takes all the fresh out of it. I only ironed them 
yesterday.” 

“Why, Maria, whistling! Like a little street 
boy!” 

The July sun might shine and the wind blow out- 
side, inside the house it was always gray, windless 
November weather. She felt herself curl up like a 
little autumn leaf, and, with a dry rattle, blow about 
the rooms before the chill admonitory breath of 
Grandmother Purdon and Aunt Maria. 


SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 165 


Yes, the family elders were right in pitying her, 
as a child brought up just as badly as it was possible 
to be; and nobody was surprised or blamed her a 
bit, when she got out of both families as rapidly and 
as unceremoniously as she could, by making a very 
early marriage with an anonymous young man, 
somebody she had met at a high-school dance. 
He seemed just like any young man, from the 
glimpse of him, which was all the family had, be- 
fore their marriage; but nobody knew a thing about 
his character or whether he would make a good hus- 
band. And, indeed, there was a big doubt in the 
family mind as to whether Maria Pearl would be any 
sort of wife or home-maker. How could she have 
learned anything about rational living, the poor lit- 
tle tyke, hustled from one bad example to another 
through all the impressionable years of her life? 
Suppose she kept house like the Manleys! Horrors! 
Or suppose she took after the Purdons! Her poor 
husband! 


Nothing of the sort! There’s not a happier home 
anywhere in the country than hers, nor a better 
housekeeper, nor a wiser mother. It’s a perfect 
treat to visit in her cheerful, sunny, orderly house, 
or to talk with her well-brought-up, jolly children, 


166 RAW MATERIAL 


or to see her well-fed, satisfied husband. And she 
herself is a joy to the eye, stout and rosy and calm. 
She is neither fussy nor slack, neither stingy nor 
extravagant, neither cold and repressed, nor slushy 
and sentimental. 

How did it happen? Probably Maria Pearl 
doesn’t know. But I do. And since it has hap- 
pened, I can see perfectly how inevitable it was. 
Whenever the routine of her houskeeping begins 
to set too hard, and she feels like flying at muddy- 
footed, careless children with the acrimony natural 
to the good housekeeper, the memory of forlorn lit- 
tle Pearl among the Purdons softens and humanizes 
her words. And when the balance begins to swing 
the other way, when she tastes that first delicious, 
poisonous languour of letting things slide, when her 
Manley blood comes to the top, she has other mem- 
ories to steady her. I have seen her sitting at the 
breakfast table, after the children are off to school, 
begin to sag in her chair, and reach with an indo- 
lent gesture for a tempting novel; and I knew what 
was in her mind as she sprang up with a start and 
began briskly to clear off the table and plan the 
lunch. 


ART ATMOSPHERE 


My cousin Angelica was one of the advance-guard. 
She bowed down and worshiped Whistler six months 
or so before the rest of humanity reached the adora- 
tion stage; and when she heard that he had opened 
a studio for “lady students” available to any one 
who would pay the entrance-fee—‘just like one of 
the second-raters who teach at Carlorossi’s’”—she 
lost no time in making tracks for the Passage Stanis- 
las, where, if I remember rightly, the Whistler 
studio was situated. 

It was, just as rumor had said, like all other 
studio-classes of that sort, except that the fee was 
many times larger; but that was legitimate, Whistler 
being the thing that winter, and the thing always 
commanding a high price in the open market. 

It was a large, grimly dirty, barn-like room, with 
a big sky-light towards the north. In it sat some 
twenty or thirty more-or-less-young ladies, most of 
them Americans (the fee was really very large) en- 


veloped in voluminous, paint-stained aprons. They 
167 


168 RAW MATERIAL 


sat, as always in such studio-classes, in a circle 
around a platform, on which stood the model. 

Once a week (or was it once a fortnight?) “the 
Master” drove up in a cab, made his way into the 
room amid palpable emanations of awe, and going 
from canvas to canvas shed upon the bowed head 
of each acolyte a little of the sacred fire of his 
genius. 

My cousin Angelica, like the others, found this a 
more than satisfactory arrangement and considered 
that she received full value for her money. We 
heard little from her that winter but enthusiasm 
over the Whistler atmosphere and scorn of every- 
thing else. In any exhibition she was to be found in 
ecstasy before some barely visible human visage sunk 
in the gloom of a dusky corner at twilight, or a 
floating, whitish blur or two on a dark-blue canvas, 
which, she told us, represented the new artistic tra- 
dition, worth all the other artistic traditions pro- 
duced since they carried the Cimabue Madonna 
through the streets—or was that a Giotto? 

I was studying philology that year and had no 
quarrel with Angelica about that sort of thing. For 
all I cared, she could give her adherence to which- 
ever artistic tradition took her fancy for the mo- 
ment. But it was occasionally inconvenient to have 


ART ATMOSPHERE 169 


her so slavishly tied to the studio-class on the days 
when they expected a criticism. Nothing could 
have tempted her away from one of those marvelous 
opportunities to profit by first-hand personal in- 
struction from a first-rate living genius. Even when 
Our one prosperous relative, Uncle Frederick, came 
through Paris and invited us over to the Right Bank 
to go to lunch with him at a fearfully expensive 
restaurant, and to sit in a fearfully expensive loge 
at the Francais afterwards, Angelica had to go first 
to the studio. 

I went with her, so that I could carry her off 
directly afterwards. This is what I saw and heard 
in the hour I spent there. 


The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered 
with gray than most Paris sunshine. The model 
was a stout, red-haired woman with the milk-white 
skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse 
of the skylight, there poured upon her opulent 
nude body, as smooth and white as a newly peeled 
almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite 
of the north exposure. The room rang with the 
high, clear brightness of that white flesh in that 
- morning light. — 

Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of 


170 RAW MATERIAL 


the Master. While I waited for Angelica, I wan- 
dered around back of them, glancing at the can- 
vases on their easels. 

They had all painted the model the color of an 
old saddle. From one dim, cavernous sketch after 
another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass looked 
out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twi- 
light. The red head glimmered faintly, attenuated 
by layers and layers of shadow. ‘The disciples 
looked up at the gleaming white woman before 
them, reflecting the daylight as definitely as a sound 
tooth reflects it, and looked down happily and 
proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could 
see how pleased they were at the progress they were 
making. They had caught it, this time, they had 
caught what was the thing to catch. 

“We'll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the 
Master’ gets here,” I thought to myself. 

Presently he came. The door swung open, I 
caught a glimpse of the concierge performing the 
impossible in the way of holding the door open and 
effacing herself in one and the same gesture, and in 
came a dapper, immaculately dressed little old gen- 
tleman, with gray gloves and pearl-gray gaiters. 

The disciples prostrated themselves, foreheads to 
the floor (or at least that is the impression they 


ART ATMOSPHERE 171 


made on me in the first intense emotion of his en- 
trance) and then stiffened to attention before their 
easels, not to miss a word of the down-dropping 
pearls and rubies. 

The little old gentleman advanced with small, 
gentlemanly steps to the first of the easels, and con- 
templated the leather-brown South-Sea-Islander de- 
picted on it. Every one of the students held her 
breath. So did I. 

He looked at it a long time, his face imperturbable. 
Then with the traditional studio gesture I had seen 
all my life in studios—outstretched thumb, model- 
ing in the air—he began saying what I had heard all 
my life in studios, ‘‘A little more shadow on the 
shoulder, I should say. And perhaps. ... Yes, go 
into the modeling of that arm more deeply. On the 
whole very promising, very interesting.” 

He passed on to the next easel. One felt another 
devout heart turn over with a rustle. “Good! Well 
felt, that knee. But lacking in distinction, perhaps, 
the treatment of the hair. Go into the modeling of 
the hands more deeply.” 

He passed to the next. And the next. And the 
next. I heard a murmur of “Very promising .. . 
very interesting . . . deeper feeling about... 
keep it flat . . . subtle . . . relations of planes not 


172 RAW MATERIAL 


quite . . . very promising . . . very interesting.” 

In half an hour it was over. He walked neatly 
back to the door, which the nearest student sprang 
to oven, and with a courteous bow all around he 
disappeared, his face imperturbable to the last. If 
he lifted a cynical eyebrow in amusement, it was 
not till after the door had closed upon him. 


Angelica and I were now free to go, and I pro- 
ceeded to the difficult undertaking of cutting her 
out from the herd of art-students milling excitedly 
around and around before the canvases, “Did you 
hear what he said about my shoulder-blade?” ‘This 
was the plane he liked on my back.” ‘He didn’t ob- 
ject to the treatment of my... .” 


The model, however, showed an imperturbability 
as complete as that of the Master. Like him, she 
had earned her pay for a morning’s work. As the 
door had closed on him, she had climbed down off 
the platform, and she was now calmly pulling her 
chemise on over her red head. 


Angelica was still a little wild-eyed and emotional 
when we emerged on the street. ‘Isn’t he wonder- 
ful?” she said, clutching at my arm. “Can’t you 


ART ATMOSPHERE 173 


understand now what a privilege it is to. . .” She 
took ten minutes to blow off this high-pressure 
steam and come down to little wandering puffs like, 
“It means so much to have such precious contacts!” 
And, “You simply take it in through your pores 
when you are in the real art atmosphere.” 


Understand me, please, I do not venture to affirm 
that this is really all that took place. I am no art- 
student and never was. There may have been 
oceans more. But this is all that I saw. 





COLONEL SHAYS 


I DARE say when you studied American history you 
read about Shays’ Rebellion, in Massachusetts, and 
duly learned that it was put down, and the instiga- 
tors punished. But I am sure that you never knew, 
and never wondered, what became of Colonel Shays 
himself, of whom the history books say succintly, 
“the leader himself, escaped.” 

I have never seen in print anything about the 
latter part of his life beyond one or two scanty 
and inaccurate references in one or two out-of-date 
books of reference; but all the older people in our 
town were brought up on stories about him, for it 
was to the valley just over the mountain from us 
that he fled after his last defeat. And later on, as 
an old man, he lived for some years in our town, 
in a house still standing, and told many people what 
I am going to set down here. 

At the time when he made his escape from the 
officers of the State in Massachusetts, Vermont was, 
quaintly enough, an independent republic, all by it- 
self, and hence a sufficient refuge for men fleeing 

175 


146 RAW MATERIAL 


from the officers of any State in the Union. Fur- 
thermore it was still rather wild, sparsely settled, 
none too respectful of any authority, and distinctly 
sympathetic to strangers who came from the east, 
south, or west over the mountains on the run, with 
the manner of men escaping from sheriffs. Sheriffs 
were not popular persons in Vermont in 1787. 

But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough 
refuge to the man with a price set on his head, the 
man who had risked everything on the boldest of 
enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by 
the rough scattered little hamlets and went into a 
remote, narrow, dark, high valley, which is to this 
day a place where a man might hide for years and 
never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, 
on foot, through the forests, came down into the 
Sandgate valley through the Beartown notch, over 
the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had 
come. 

He made his first camp, which was also his per- 
manent and last one, since he was never disturbed, 
high up on a shoulder of the mountain, overlooking 
the trail for a great distance, and densely surrounded 
with a thick growth of pine trees. Very cautiously, 
making no noise, using the ax and knife which were 
his only tools, he put up a rough shelter, and build- 


COLONEL SHAYS 177 


ing a fire only at night in a hollow where rocks 
masked its flame, began cooking some of the game 
he caught. He lived in this way, all alone for years 
and years. Game was abundant; like most men of 
that time he was an adroit trapper, a good pioneer, 
and knew how to smoke and preserve the flesh of 
animals and to save their skins. For the first 
year he did not dare to let any one know that a man 
was living there, and literally saw not one soul. 

Then one day about a year after he began this 
life, a little boy going fishing saw a tall, strong, 
black-haired stranger standing in the trail and hold- 
ing a large packet of furs. He told the child to take 
the packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed- 
corn and a bag of salt. He specified that the man 
who brought it was to leave it just where they then 
stood and go away without waiting. 

The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, 
good-natured trapper, who had had troubles of his 
own with unreasonable officers of the law in York 
State.. When the child told his story, the father 
laughed knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn 
and the salt, left them in the place indicated, and 
kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not read or 
write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and sup- 
posed the man in hiding to be in the same situation 


178 RAW MATERIAL 


as himself. Living as he did, it seemed no awful fate 
to make one’s living out of the woods, and he thought 
little of the fact that he had a new neighbor. 

After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultiva- 
tion of the ground, in scattered places, hidden be- 
hind screens of thick trees, in a few natural clear- 
ings in the forest. He used to say that life was in- 
finitely more tolerable to him after the addition to 
his diet of salt and cereals. After some months he 
risked a little more, and, buying them with furs 
worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools 
and some gunpowder. The transactions were always 
carried on through the child, the only one to see the 
fugitive. 

Nothing has come down to me of what this terri- 
ble dead halt in mid-career, and this grim isolation 
from the world meant to the active, intelligent, am- 
bitious man at the height of his powers. None of 
the old people who heard him talk seem to have 
asked him about this, or to have had any curiosity 
on the subject. Only the bare facts are known, that 
he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew 
up, till his own hair turned gray and then white, till 
the few families in that valley were quite used to the 
knowledge that a queer, harmless old man was living 
up in the woods near the northern pass of the moun- 


COLONEL SHAYS 179 


tains, miles from any neighbor. Once in a great 
while, now, some one saw him—a boy fishing, a 
hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group of women 
picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few 
words with his neighbors at such times, but he had 
almost forgotten how to speak aloud. All the 
stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarse- 
ness of his unused voice. 

One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him 
a kindness, told him with a rough good-will that he 
might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever ’tis you 
done, ’tis so long past now! And up here... no- 
body from your part of the country, wherever ’tis, 
would ever be coming up here. And if they did they 
wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother 
wouldn’t know you in them clothes, and with that 
white beard.” 

It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew 
back and looked down at himself with a strange air 
of astonishment. 

Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some 
weeks after this, he decided to risk it, and to make 
the trip to Cambridge, the nearest town to those 
mountain settlements. Early one morning the peo- 
ple of the Sandgate valley were astonished to see the 
old man going down the trail of the valley which 


180 RAW MATERIAL 


led into the State road going to Cambridge. Well, 
that was something to talk about! He was going 
to town at last like anybody else. 


Now, this happened a good many years after 
Shays’ Rebellion had failed, and the bitterness of 
the feeling about it had died down. Although Colo- 
nel Shays could not know this, most people had even 
forgotten all about him, and as for looking for him 
to arrest him, nobody would have dreamed of doing 
it. There were many other things in the world to 
think of by that time and although to himself 
Colonel Shays was still the dramatically hunted 
fugitive with every man’s hand against him, to other 
people he had begun to sink into the history-book 
paragraph, which he has since remained. His family 
and friends in Massachusetts had waited till the oc- 
casion seemed favorable, and then petitioned for 
his pardon, on the ground that he must be, if still 
living, an old man now, quite harmless, and that it 
would be only decent to let him come back to spend 
his last days in his own home; and if he were dead, 
his pardon would clear his family name, and 
straighten out certain complications about his prop- 
erty. At first they had not succeeded. People still 
remembered too vividly the treasonable attempt to 


COLONEL SHAYS 181 


overturn the authority of the State, only just estab- 
lished and none too strong. But by and by, the per- 
tinacity of the petitioners wore out the fading hostil- 
ity to his name. He was proclaimed pardoned, and 
notices were sent to all American newspapers in- 
forming him that he could now.return. This had 
happened a year before Colonel Shays had started 
down to Cambridge, but you may be sure that at 
that period no newspapers found their way to the 
Sandgate valley. 

After a year had gone by, and no sign came from 
the fugitive, people generally thought him dead. 
But a fellow-townsman who had known him well by 
sight and who, some years after his flight, had mar- 
ried his youngest sister, volunteered to try to spread 
the news more widely than by newspaper. ‘There 
had been a faint notion among his kinspeople that 
he had fled to Vermont, although they had taken 
care to keep this to themselves as long as he was an 
outlaw, and had now almost forgotten about it. 
Acting on this notion, Shays’ brother-in-law took the 
long journey on horseback up into Vermont. He 
entered the state at Bennington and slowly worked 
his way north, branching off at every practicable 
road. But nowhere did he find any one who had 
ever heard of any such man as his wife’s brother. 


182 RAW MATERIAL 


Colonel Shays had hidden himself only too well. 

The Massachusetts man began to think his errand 
a futile one, and prepared to turn back. But on a 
chance he rode down to Cambridge, just over the 
New York line. Cambridge was the nearest town 
to a number of small valley settlements in Vermont. 
He would ask there if any one had seen or heard of 
the man he was seeking. He knew that men from 
the remote outlying settlements came to Cambridge 
to do their trading. He arrived rather late one eve- 
ning and as he was no longer young, and very much 
tired by his long and fruitless journey, he slept that 
night in the Cambridge Inn. 


For the rest of the story there are plenty of de- 
tails, for Colonel Shays told over and over exactly 
what happened and just how he felt, and why he 
acted as he did. It seared deep into him, and to the 
end of his days, he always showed a consuming agi- 
tation in speaking of it. 

He walked along the road, the first road he had 
seen since the night so many years ago when he had 
fled along the roads in Massachusetts. It seemed 
like iron to his buckskin-shod feet. He walked 
slowly for this and other reasons. Every house 
which came into view along the road brought him 


COLONEL SHAYS 183 


up short with a jerk like a frightened horse. The 
instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, 
had deformed his whole nature so that the bold 
leader of men halted, trembling and white-faced, at 
the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced him- 
self to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after 
he had passed each one with his silent, stealthy 
wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his pace and 
looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see 
men run out after him with warrants for his arrest. 

By the time he approached Cambridge, the nerv- 
ous strain was telling on him. He was wet with 
sweat, and as tired as though he had been four times 
over the mountains. Only a few people were 
abroad as it was the breakfast hour. Partly from 
the old fear of years, partly from the mere habit of 
total isolation, every strange face was startling to 
him. He felt his knees weak under him and sat 
down on a bench in front of the kitchen door of the 
Cambridge Inn to get his breath. He had been a 
man of powerful will and strong self-control or he 
never could have lived through those terrible years 
of being buried alive, and he now angrily told him- 
self there was nothing to fear in this remote little 
hamlet, where everybody was used to the sight of 
men in buckskins coming down to trade their furs 


184 RAW MATERIAL 


for gunpowder and salt. At the sight of all those 
human faces taking him back to the days of his 
human life, a deep yearning had come upon him 
to get back into the world of living men. He could 
have wept aloud and taken them into his arms like 
brothers. He was determined to master his tense 
nerves, to learn to move about among his fellow- 
men once more. In a moment, just a moment, he 
decided he would stand up and move casually over 
to the general store across the street where a lad 
was then unlocking the door. He would go in and 
make a purchase—the first in so many years! 

He turned his head to glance into the kitchen of 
the Inn, and as he did so, the door opened, and a 
man came in, a traveler with a face familiar to him 
in spite of gray hair and wrinkles, a man he had 
known in Massachusetts, who knew him, and no 
friend of his, a man who had been on the other side 
in the Rebellion. 

Colonel Shays’ heart gave a staggering leap. He 
caught at the door-jamb and shrank out of sight. 
He heard the other voice say, “I stepped in to ask 
if any of you know whether Colonel Shays was 
ever heard of in this . . .” 

And then the old man, running madly for his life, 
fled back to his den in the woods. 


COLONEL SHAYS 185 


A whole decade passed after this, before he hap- 
pened to learn in a conversation overheard between 
two trappers, that for eleven priceless, irreplace- 
able years, he had been a free man. 





A GREAT LOVE 


WHEN my pretty young cousin and god-daughter, 
Flossie, fell in love with Peter Carr, we all felt rather 
apprehensive about her future. But Flossie faced 
the facts with an honest, even a rather grim resolu- 
tion which surprised us. She said with only a little 
tremor in her voice that she never expected to oc- 
cupy the place in Peter’s heart which Eleanor Arling 
had taken forever, but that she loved him so much 
she was willing to take whatever he could give her. 
It wasn’t Ais fault, she said, with the quaintest chiv- 
alric defiance of us, if poor Peter hadn’t more to 
give. She thought a great love like that “was a 
noble thing in any one’s life, even if it did make 
them perfectly miserable.” If Miss Arling felt that 
personal happiness must be sacrified for her art, 
why, that was an exalted attitude to take, and Peter’s 
sorrow was “sacred in her eyes”; and so on and so 
forth—the usual things that are said in such cases 
by people who are in sympathy with that sort of 
thing. 

So they were married, with the understanding that 

187 


188 RAW MATERIAL 


Peter could still go on worshiping the very sound 
of Eleanor Arling’s name and turning white when 
he came across a mention of her or of her pictures in 
the cabled news of the art world in Paris. Flossie 
was, sO we all agreed, a good sport if there ever 
was one, and she stuck gamely to her bargain. She 
had transferred the big silver-framed photograph of 
Miss Arling from Peter’s bachelor quarters to the 
wall of their new living room, and she dusted it as 
conscientiously as she did the Botticelli Spring 
which I gave her for a wedding present. It was not 
easy for her. I have seen her flush deeply and set 
her lips hard as Peter looked up at the dusky brood- 
ing eyes shadowed by the casque of black braids. 
Flossie is one of the small, quick, humming-bird 
women, with nothing to set against Miss Arling’s 
massive classic beauty, and by her expression at 
such moments, I know she felt her defenselessness 
bitterly. But she never let Peter see how she felt. 
She had taken him, the darkness of his unrequited 
passion heavy on him, and if she ever regretted it, 
she gave no sign. | 

She flashed about the house, keeping it in perfect 
order, feeding Peter the most delicious food, and 
after the twins came, caring for them with no strain 
or nervous tension, with only a bright thankful en- 


A GREAT LOVE 189 


joyment of them that was warm on your heart like 
sunshine. Peter enjoyed his pretty home and de- 
voted wife and lively babies and excellent food. He 
began to lay on flesh, and to lose the haggard, gray 
leanness which, just after Miss Arling had gone 
away, had made people turn and look after him in 
the street. Architecture is, even when you are busy 
and successful as Peter is, a rather sedentary occu- 
pation, offering no resistance to such cooking as 
Flossie’s. Peter’s skin began to grow rosy and sleek, 
his hair from being rough and bristling, began to 
look smooth and glossy. It was quite beautiful 
hair as long as it lasted; but as the years went on 
and the twins began to be big children, it, unlike the 
rest of Peter, began to look thinner. Peter with a 
bald spot was queer enough, but before he was thir- 
ty-five it was not a mere spot, but all the top of his 
head. We thought it very becoming to him as it 
gave him a beneficent, thoughtful, kindly look, like 
a philosopher. And his added weight was also 
distinctly an improvement to his looks. We often 
said to each other that nobody would ever have 
thought that crazy-looking boy would make such a 
nice-looking man. 

Flossie had not changed an atom. Those tiny, 
slight women occasionally remain stationary in 


190 RAW MATERIAL 


looks as though they were in cold storage. She con- 
tinued to worship Peter, and as he had made a good 
husband, we had nothing to say, although of course 
you never can understand what an excessively de- 
voted wife sees in her husband, year after year. 
Flossie never mitigated in the least the extremity of 
her attention to Peter’s needs. When he was called 
away on a business trip she always saw that his 
satchel was packed with just what he would need; 
and she would have risen from her grave to put ex- 
actly the right amount of cream and sugar into his 
coffee. 

The rest of us had forgotten all about Miss Ar- 
ling’s connection with Peter, and had grown so 
used to the big photograph of the big, handsome 
woman that we did not see it any more, when one 
morning I found Flossie waiting for me as I came 
downstairs. She was very pale, with dark circles 
under her eyes. She was holding a newspaper in 
her clenched hand—the New York newspaper they 
had always taken on account of its full, gossipy 
“Happenings in the World of Art” column. Flossie 
opened it to that column now, and read in a dry 
voice :‘“American art lovers are promised a treat in 
the visit of the famous Eleanor Arling who arrives 
on the Mauretania. Miss Arling plans an extensive 


A GREAT LOVE IQI 


trip in her native country from which she has been 
absent for many years. She will visit New York, 
Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. 
Her keen artistic memory is shown by her intention 
of breaking her trip for a few days at...” Flos- 
sie’s voice broke. . . . “She’s coming kere!” she 
gasped. Then collecting herself, she continued read- 
ing, “Miss Arling told our interviewer that she once 
passed some weeks there and remembers with pleas- 
ure a composition of cliff, water, and pine trees. 
She wishes to see it again.” 

“Cliff, water, and pine trees,” repeated Flossie, 
her eyes blazing. “Of course we know it is nothing 
in the way of a landscape she is coming to see here!” 
I saw that her little fists were clenched. “I won’t 
stand it!” she cried, “I won’t stand it!” 

But she looked horribly frightened all the same. 

“What can you do?” I asked, sympathizing pain- 
fully with the poor little thing. 

“T shall go to her the minute she reaches town.” 

This threw me into a panic, “What good would 
that do?” I cried, alarmed at the prospect of scenes 
and goings-on. 

“T don’t know! I don’t know! If I see her, I 
can think of some way to make her go away and 
not . . .” she said wildly. 


192 RAW MATERIAL 


I hoped devoutly that she would settle down from 
this hysterical state of unreason, but three days after 
this she darted in, her face pinched, and told me that 
the time was now, and that she wanted me to be 
with her. . . . “I must have somebody there,” she 
said piteously. 

I was thoroughly alarmed, protested, tried des- 
perately to back out, but found myself in Flossie’s 
car driving at a dangerous rate of speed towards 
Miss Arling’s hotel. 

We were shown into the sitting room of her suite, 
and sat down, both breathing hard. I am fond of 
Flossie and I was very sorry for her, but I certainly 
wished her at the other end of the world just then. 
If I had not feared she would have rushed to lock 
me in, I would have tried to escape even then, but 
before I could collect myself, the door opened, and 
a stout, middle-aged woman came in. Her straight 
gray hair was bobbed and hanging in strings around 
a very red, glistening face. It was terribly hot 
weather and she had, I suppose, just came in from 
the long motor trip. She had a lighted cigarette in 
one hand. Her cushiony shapeless feet were thrust 
into a pair of Japanese sandals. She distinctly wad- 
dled as she walked. We supposed that she was 
Miss Arling’s companion, and I said, because Flossie 


A GREAT LOVE 193 


was too agitated to speak, ‘“‘We wished to speak to 
Miss Arling, please.” 

“IT am Miss Arling,” she said casually. ‘Won’t 
you sit down?” I don’t know what I did, but I 
heard Flossie give a little squeak like a terrified 
rabbit. So I hurried on, saying desperately the first 
thing that came into my mind. ‘“We heard you were 
coming ...in the newspapers... we are old 
residents here . . . a cliff, water, and pine trees. 
. . . L know the view . . . we thought perhaps we 
might show you where. .. .” 

She was surprised a little at my incoherence and 
Flossie’s strange face, but she was evidently a much- 
experienced woman-of-the-world, whom nothing 
could surprise very much. “Oh, that’s very kind,” 
she said civilly, tossing her cigarette butt away and 
folding her strong hands on her ample knees, “But 
I went that way on the road coming into town. I 
remembered it perfectly I find. I used it as the 
background in a portrait, some years ago.” 

She saw no reason for expanding the topic and 
now stopped speaking. I could think of nothing 
more to say. There was a profound silence. Our 
hostess evidently took us for tongue-tied, small- 
town people who do not know how to get themselves 
out of a room, and went on making conversation 


194 RAW MATERIAL 


for us with a vague, fluent, absent-minded kindness. 
“Tt’s very pleasant to be here again. I stayed here 
once, you know, a few weeks, many years ago, 
when I was young. We had quite a jolly time, I re- 
member. There was a boy here . . . a slim, dark, 
tall fellow, with the most perfect early-Renaissance 
head imaginable, quite like the Jeune Homme In- 
connu. I’ve been trying all day to remember his 
name? Paul? ...no. Walter? ... it had two 
syllables it seems to me. Well, at any rate, he had 
two great beauties, the pale, flat white of his skin, 
and his great shaggy mass of dark hair. I’ve often 
used his hair in drawings, since. But I don’t sup- 
pose he looks like that now.” 

Flossie spoke. She spoke with the effect of a 
revolver discharging a bullet, ‘““Oh, yes, he does! He 
looks exactly like that still, only more mature, more 
interesting,” she said in an indignant tone. 

“Ah, indeed,” said the painter with an accent of 
polite acquiescence. She sighed now and looked 
firmly at the clock. I rose and said since we could 
not be of use to her, we would leave her to rest. 

She accompanied us to the door pleasantly 
enough, with the professional, impersonal courtesy 
of a celebrity. : 

Outside Flossie sprang into her car, leaving me 


A GREAT LOVE 195 


stranded on the sidewalk. “I must get Peter away,” 
she said between her teeth. 

“But not now, surely!” I cried. 

“‘Now more than ever,” she flung back at me, as 
she whirled the car around. 

Then as I stood open-mouthed, utterly at a loss, 
she drove the car close to the curb and leaning to 
my ear, whispered fiercely, ‘“‘You don’t suppose I’d 
let him see how she looks now.” 


Miss Arling was gone before they returned from 
the two-day fishing-trip on which they started that 
night. I doubt if Peter ever heard that she had been 
in town. 

The morning after their return, as soon as Peter 
had gone downtown, Flossie tore down the big 
photograph from the wall and flung it into the gar- 
bage can. 

I noticed its absence some days later, when I went 
over to see them, and asked with a little apprehen- 
sion, “What did Peter say when he found it gone?” 

The strangest expression came into her face. She 
said in a low tone, “He has never even missed it.” 
And then she began to cry. As I looked at her, I 
saw that she had suddenly begun to show her age. 





SUPPLY AND DEMAND 


THE thoughtful intellectual people around the fire 
were talking with animation and conviction, and I 
hoped the one business-man present, a relative of 
mine, was appreciating his privileges. It was not 
often that you could collect before your fire so many 
brilliant people representing so many important 
varieties of human activity; and when you had col- 
lected them it was not often that the talk fell on a 
subject big enough to draw out of each one his most 
hotly held conviction. 

The subject was big enough in all conscience: 
nothing more or less than what is the matter with 
the world in general and with our country in par- 
ticular. They all had different ideas about what 
the trouble is and about the best cure for it. The 
head nurse of the big City Hospital had started the 
ball rolling by some of her usual scornful remarks 
about the idiocy with which most people run their 
physical lives, and the super-idiocy, as she put it, 
“which makes them think that doctors and nurses 
can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.” 

“We'll never have any health as a nation till we 

197 


198 RAW MATERIAL 


have health as individuals,” she said. “See that the 
babies have clean milk; give the children plenty of 
space and time for out-door play; keep the young 
folks busy with athletic sports; run down all the 
diphtheria carriers and make it a misdemeanor not 
to be both vaccinated for small-pox and inoculated 
against typhoid . . . and we’d be a nation such as 
the world never saw before.” 

The political reformer was sincerely shocked by 
the narrowness of her views, and took her down in a 
long description of our villainously mismanaged 
government. “Much good mere physical health 
would do against our insane tolerance of such po- 
litical ineptness and corruption!” he ended. “What 
we need is an awakening to the importance of gov- 
ernment as every man’s personal business.” 

Mrs. Maynard, the tragic-faced, eloquent Scotch 
expert on birth-control, now said in that low, bitter 
voice of hers which always makes every one stop 
to listen, “I would be obliged if you would point out 
to me how either physical health or the very best 
of municipal governments should alleviate in the 
slightest, the hideous ulcers of our so-called respect- 
able married homes. When the very foundation of 
every-day human life is cemented in such unthink- 
able cruelty and suffering to defenseless women, I 


SUPPLY AND DEMAND 199 


don’t see how human beings with hearts in their 
bosoms can stop for an instant to consider such 
puerile non-essentials as athletics and party poli- 
tics!” 

The two or three happily married women in the 
group, startled by her fierce acrimony, were silent, 
feeling abashed by the grossly comfortable way we 
had managed to escape even a knowledge of the hor- 
rors which she so urgently assured us were universal. 
But Mr. Sharpless, the efficiency engineer, shook his 
head pityingly. ‘No, no, my dear lady, you can’t 
cure anything by going at it with the hammer and 
tongs of direct action. The economic key is the only 
one that fits all locks, opens all doors. The women 
of what we call the ‘upper classes’ do not suffer as 
you describe. You know they don’t. Now why do 
we call them the ‘upper classes’? Because they 
have money. You know it! Hence, if everybody 
had money ...! I tell you the thing to do is to 
reorganize our wretched old producing machinery 
till ever so much more is produced, ever so much 
more easily; and then invent distributing machinery 
that will ensure everybody’s getting his share. You 
may not think home life is much affected by the 
chemist in his laboratory, devising a way to get nitro- 
gen chiefly from the air, or by the engineer strug- 


200 RAW MATERIAL 


gling with the problem of free power out of the tides 
or the sun. But it is. Just once put a// women in 
the comfortable upper classes. . . .” 

He was interrupted here by a number of protest- 
ing voices, all speaking at once, the loudest of which, 
Professor Oleny’s finally drowned out the others, 
“. . . money without intelligence is the most fatal 
combination conceivable to man! Economic pros- 
perity would spell speedy destruction without an 
overhauling of education.” He spun like a pin- 
wheel for a moment, in a sparkling, devastating 
characterization of American schools, and of their 
deadening effect on the brains which passed through 
them, and began on a description of what schools 
should be. 

But I had heard him lecture on that only the day 
before and, looking away from him, sought out the 
face of my cousin, the business-man. He had sat 
through it all, and now continued to sit through the 
free-for-all debate which followed, without opening 
his mouth except to emit an occasional thoughtful 
puff of cigar-smoke. His thoughts seemed to be 
with the billowing smoke-rings, which he sent to- 
wards the ceiling rather than with the great sweep 
of the subjects being discussed. I knew well enough 
that his silence did not come in the least from any 


SUPPLY AND DEMAND 201 


inability to follow the pyrotechnics about him, and 
I felt in his absent preoccupation something of 
the disdain, traditionally felt for talkers and 
reformers by men of action—when in the twen- 
tieth century and in the United States, you say 
“man of action” you mean of course, “business- 
man.” 

It nettled me a little, and after the others had 
gone and he was finishing the end of his cigar, I 
said challengingly, “I suppose you think they are 
all off! I suppose you think that you know what is 
the matter with the world and that it is something 
quite different.” 

He considered the end of his cigar meditatively 
and answered mildly, ‘I don’t think I know, I know 
I know.” 

“Oh, you do, do you?” I said, amused and ironic. 
“Would you mind telling me what it is?” 

He shucked further down in his chair, tipped his 
head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, if 
you really want to know, I'll tell you a story that 
happened just lately in one of the biggest mail- 
order houses in this country. Of course, I know 
that you don’t fully appreciate the importance of 
mail-order houses, not being in business. And 
they’re too through and through American a growth 


202 RAW MATERIAL 


for people like your friends to-night to know about 
or talk about. But some of the best brains and real 
sure-enough genius in the United States have gone 
into creating the mail-order house idea. Maybe you 
might allow that to be a good enough reason for 
considering for a moment what goes on inside one 
of them .. . what? 

‘“‘As a matter of fact, the story isn’t just about a 
mail-order house, but about what is the matter with 
the world . . . the very same subject your friends 
were debating. My story won’t have so many long 
words in it as they use, nor so many abstract ideas 

. at least on the surface; but it won’t do you 
any harm to soak it away and think it over. I'll tell 
you what, /’ve been thinking it over this evening, as 
I listened to the talk. I only heard the story this 
morning, and it’s stuck in my head all day... 
and especially this evening, as they were all talking 
about how to hit on some organization of society 
that would really fix things up, once and for all.” 

He paused for a moment, stretched his legs out 
straight before him and put his hands into his 
pockets. “If I really told you all you ought to 
know, to understand the background and setting of 
the story, I’d be sitting here to-morrow morning still 
talking. So I won’t try, I’ll just tell you the plain 


SUPPLY AND DEMAND 203 


story as it happened. You try to imagine the back- 
ground: an organization as big, as complicated, with 
as many chances for waste motion, or overorganiza- 
tion, or poor organization as society itself. And not 
only power and glory, but cash, plenty of hard cash 
as immediate reward for the successful use of brains. 

“Well now, into that arrives a smart youngster 
full of enthusiasm for making things run better, just 
like your friends to-night; dead sure just like them 
that /e has the key; with lots of pep and brains and 
interest in his job, pushing his way right up from 
the stenographer’s desk, with his eye on the Mana- 
ger’s. Do you get him? Well, he’s laid awake 
nights, thinking how to improve the organization, 
partly because he wanted to improve it, partly be- 
cause he wanted to get the credit for it . . . just 
like your friends again. And because he is a smart 
young fellow as keen as a razor, he soon figured out 
a way to increase business, to increase it like a house 
afire, and to handle it once it was increased. 

“He went to the big man of the concern and laid 
out his plans. Now, you’d better believe the big 
men in any organization always have a glad hand 
out for anybody in the concern who’ll show interest 
and brains; and the boy got treated like a king. 
Sure, he could try out his plan! On a small scale 


204 RAW MATERIAL 


at first, to see how it would work. Let him take a 
county out of each of six selected states, and con- 
centrate on them. And, sure, yes, indeed, he could 
have anything in the organization he wanted, to 
make his try with. 

“So the boy went away bounding like a rubber-ball 
and planned his campaign. I won’t bother you by 
trying to tell you what it was. . . . It wouldn’t in- 
terest you, and anyhow you couldn’t understand the 
business details. It was a mixture of intensive pub- 
licity, special attention paid to detail, a follow-up 
system that meant personal care and personal ac- 
quaintance with the tastes of customers, and inti- 
mate knowledge of what past orders from customers 
had been. To get the right kind of assistants he 
went through the various departments of that big 
organization and hand-picked his staff; the very best 
of the publicity men, the smartest of the order- 
clerks, the brightest of the stenographers. And then 
they just tore in and ate up the territory they were 
practising on! They plowed it with publicity, and 
sowed it with personal service, they reaped, by 
George, a harvest that would put your eye out! 
Business increased by a twenty-five per cent, by a 
fifty per cent! At the end of a year, the boy, too 
big for his skin, paraded into the Manager-in-chief’s 


SUPPLY AND DEMAND 205 


office with statistics to prove a seventy-five per cent 
increase over any business ever done there before! 
Well, that was simply grand, wasn’t it? Yes, the 
Manager would certainly sit up and take some notice 
of a system that had accomplished that!” 

My cousin had finished his cigar, now threw the 
butt into the fire-place, and sat looking at the em- 
bers with a somber expression. I couldn’t see any- 
thing to look somber about. Indeed I found my- 
self stifling a yawn. What did I care how much 
business a mail-order house did or how they did it? 

My cousin answered my thought, “Don’t you see 
that the story is all about the same general idea you 
were all discussing this evening? It is about get- 
ting things done more intelligently, more efficiently, 
about avoiding fool mistakes, about rising to big 
opportunities, about learning how to scramble over 
the obstacles that prevent human beings from being 
intelligent and efficient and effective. Now, then, 
at the first take-off, the boy had soared right over 
those obstacles, hadn’t he? But the Manager-in- 
chief knew a thing or two about them, too. In fact 
he had grown bald and gray trying to climb over 
those very same obstacles. But you can be sure 
the boy didn’t once think that his chief might be 
just as anxious as he was to have things done better. 


206 RAW MATERIAL 


Boys never do. . . .” There was a pause, while my 
cousin considered the embers moodily. 

“So, by and by, after the boy had fizzed the place 
all foamy with his wonderful statistics, the bald- 
headed, gray-haired Manager began to come down 
to brass tacks, and to inquire just how the thing had 
been done. The boy was crazy to tell him, went 
into every detail; and the Manager listened hard. 

“And then he shook his old bald gray head. He 
said: ‘Young fellow, you listen to me. It takes 
sense to run that system of yours. You’re counting 
on everybody, from you right down to the boy that 
works your mimeograph, paying attention to what 
he’s doing, using his brains and using them every 
minute. If everybody doesn’t, you won’t get your 
results, will you? Now, consider this, how did you 
get hold of a staff that would have any brains to 
use and would use them? You know how! We let 
you run a fine tooth comb through our whole or- 
ganization, thousands and thousands of employees. 
You took out of every department the very best 
they had; three or four out of hundreds, and they 
are the only ones out of thousands who amount to 
anything after years of training at our expense. 
And then you put your very best licks into it your- 
self. Now, who are you? Youw’re the first stenog- 


SUPPLY AND DEMAND 207 


rapher we’ve had in ten years, who took enough 
interest in the business as a whole to have a single 
idea about it. You tell me something. Suppose we 
reorganized along your lines, who would I get to 
run all the other departments and keep up the high- 
speed efficiency and red-hot ambition you’ve shown, 
which is the oly reason your scheme works? You 
know as well as I do I can’t find another one, let 
alone the eighty or ninety I’d have to have, if we 
tried to do business on your plan. And if I could— 
supposing for the sake of argument that an angel 
from Heaven served such department heads to me 
on a silver platter, where am I going to find staffs to 
work with them. You’ve goé all the really efficient 
employees we’ve been able to rake in from the whole 
United States in the past twenty years. 

“Did you ever have to work with a plain, ordi- 
nary six-for-a-quarter stenographer, such as the busi- 
ness colleges turn out, such as you mostly get? 
You’ve built your machine so that only brains and 
sense will run it. How long would it take a couple 
of hundred of such stenogs to smash your system 
into splinters? Did you ever have to try and get 
work out of the average dressy young employee who 
puts ninety-eight and a half per cent of what gray 
matter he has on his neckties and the bets he made 


208 RAW MATERIAL 


on the horse-races, and the little flier he took on 
stocks; and one and a half per cent of his brains on 
his work when somebody higher up is looking at 
him? How do you suppose you can persuade a 
crowd of light-weights like that to care a whoop 
whether Mrs. Arrowsmith in Cohoes, N. Y., is sat- 
isfied with the color of the linoleum rug she 
bought?’ ” 

My cousin looked at me hard, and again answered 
an unspoken thought of mine. “Are you wondering 
why hadn’t the boy interrupted long before this, to 
hold up his end, if he was really so enthusiastic as 
I’ve said? This is the reason. Though he hadn’t let 
on to the Manager, he really had had plenty of trou- 
bles of his own, already, keeping even his hand- 
picked crew up to the scratch. Many’s the time he’d 
been ready to murder them! Drive as hard as he 
might, he couldn’t keep them steadily up to the 
standard he’d set for his work. He’d noticed that. 
Oh, yes, of course, he’d noticed it all right, and he’d 
been furious about it. But until that minute, he 
hadn’t thought of it—what it meant; and the minute 
the Manager spoke, he knew in his bones the old man 
was right. And he felt things come down with a 
smash. 

“It pretty nearly knocked him silly. He never 


SUPPLY AND DEMAND 209 


said a word. And the old bald-head looked at him, 
and saw that in the last three minutes the boy had 
grown up... he’d grown up! That hurts, hurts 
more than any visit to the dentist. I know how 
he felt; probably the Manager knew how he felt. 
Anybody who’s ever tried to get anything done has 
run his head into that stone wall. 

“Well, he was sorry for the kid, and tried to let 
him down easy. He went on talking, to give the 
boy time to catch his breath. ‘You understand, I’d 
like, maybe more than you, to reorganize the whole 
ball o’ wax, on any lines that would work better. 
And there are lots of good points in your plan that 
we can use, plenty of ’em. This invention of yours 
about cross-indexing orders now, that is a splendid 
idea. I believe we could install that . . . it looks 
almost fool proof! And maybe we might run a spe- 
cial mailing-list along the lines you’ve worked out. 
Lemme look at it again. Well, I guess the mistakes 
the stenogs would make might be more than offset 
by the extra publicity . . . maybe!’ 

“But the lad was feeling too cut up to pay any 
attention to these little poultices. He stood there, 
and almost fell in pieces, he was thinking so hard. 
Not very cheerful thoughts, at that. When he 
could get his breath he leaned over the table and 


210 RAW MATERIAL 


said in a solemn, horrified voice, ‘Good God, Mr. 
Burton, why then... why then .. .’ He was all 
but plumb annihilated by the hardness of the fact 
that had just hit him on the head. He broke out, 
‘What’s the use of inventing a better system as long 
as ...as long as...?’ he got it out finally. 
‘Why, Mr. Burton, there just aren’t enough folks 
with sense to go around!’ ” , 

My cousin stood up, moved to the hall, secured 
his hat and looked in at me through the door-way. 
“Poor kid!” he commented pityingly. “Just think of 
his never having thought of that before!” 


UNCLE ELLIS 


I NEVER saw my Uncle Ellis because he died before 
I was born, but I heard a great deal about him when 
I was a child. His stepdaughter married one of our 
fellow-townsmen, and lived next door to us when I 
was a little girl, and her mother, my great-aunt, 
Uncle Ellis’ third wife, lived with her. Whatever 
Cousin Ruth did not say about her stepfather, Aunt 
Molly supplied. The two women spent the rest of 
their lives hating him, and for his sake hated, dis- 
trusted and despised all men. 

The gruesome impressions of married life which 
float through the air to most little girls, came to me 
from their half-heard and half-understood stories of 
Uncle Ellis. He had killed his first two wives, they . 
said, just as much as though he had taken an ax 
to them, and only his opportune death had saved 
Aunt Molly from the same fate. His innumerable 
children—I would never venture to set down how 
many he had, all in legal marriage—feared and de- 
tested him and ran away from home as soon as they 


could walk. He was meanness itself, secret, sneak- 
2iI 


212 RAW MATERIAL 


ing meanness, the sort of man who would refuse his 
wife money for a wringer to do the family wash, and 
spend five dollars on a box of cigars; he would fly 
into a black rage over a misplaced towel, and perse- 
cute the child who had misplaced it, till she was 
ready to commit suicide; and then open his arms 
with a spectacular smile to the new baby of a parish- 
ioner. After mistreating his wife till she could 
hardly stand, she used to hear him holding forth in 
a boys’ meeting, exhorting them to a chivalric at- 
titude towards women. 

Aunt Molly died long ago, firing up to the last in 
vindictive reminiscences of her husband. Ruth is 
dead now, too, in the fullness of time. I am a mid- 
dle-aged woman, and probably the only one now 
alive who ever heard those two talk about Uncle 
Ellis; and I had forgotten him. If he stayed at all 
in my memory it was with the vague, disembodied 
presence of a character in a book. 


About a month ago, I accepted an invitation to 
speak at a convention in a town in the middle-west 
which I had never seen, but the name of which 
seemed slightly familiar; perhaps, I thought, because 
I had learned it in a geography lesson long ago. 
But when I arrived I understood the reason. It was 


UNCLE ELLIS 213 


the town where for many years Uncle Ellis had been 
pastor of the church. At the railway station, as I 
stepped down on the platform, one of the older 
women in the group who met me, startled me by 
saying, ‘“‘We have been especially anxious to see you 
because of your connection with our wonderful Dr. 
Ellis Randolph. I was a young girl when he died, 
but I can truly say that my whole life has been in- 
fluenced for good by the words and example of that 
saintly man.” 

The elderly man beside her added, ‘‘You will find 
many here who will say the same. In the formative 
period of our town’s history he made an indelible 
impression for good.” 

They took me to his church, where a large bronze 
tablet set forth his virtues and his influence. They 
showed me the Ellis Randolph Memorial Library. 
I was shown the public playground which he con- 
ceived a generation before any one else thought of 
such a thing. But what made the deepest impres- 
sion on me were the men and women who came to 
shake my hand because I was Uncle Ellis’ niece, be- 
cause they wanted to testify to the greatness of his 
value in their lives. The minister of the town, a 
white-haired man, told me with a deep note of emo- 
tion in his voice, that Dr. Randolph had done more 


214 RAW MATERIAL 


than merely save his life; in his wayward youth he 
had saved his soul alive. The banker told me that 
he had heard many celebrated orators, but never 
any one who could go straight to the heart like Dr. 
Randolph. “I often tell my wife that she ought to 
be thankful to Dr. Randolph for a lecture on chivalry 
to women which he gave to us boys, at an impres- 
sionable moment of our lives.” 

And the old principal of the school said, ““Not a 
year goes by that I do not thank God for sending 
that righteous man to be an example to my youth. 
He left behind him many human monuments to his 


glory.” 


What did I say to them? Oh, I didn’t say any- 
thing to them. I couldn’t think of anything to say. 


GOD’S COUNTRY 


WHEN I was a faculty-child living in a middle-wes- 
tern university town we were all thrilled by the news 
that the energetic Chancellor of the University had 
secured as head of the Department of Chemistry a 
noted European scientist. Although still young he 
had made a name for himself by some important 
discoveries in organic chemistry. We talked about 
those discoveries as fluently, and understood about 
them as thoroughly as we all now discuss and under- 
stand the theories of Professor Einstein. 

Professor Behrens was not only a remarkable 
chemist, so we heard, but a remarkable teacher and 
a man of wide sympathies and democratic ideals. It 
was the candid period in American life, when, es- 
pecially in the west, the word ‘Europe’ was pro- 
nounced with a very special intonation, of which 
Henry James’ wistful admiration was the quintes- 
sence. It was the time in American university life 
when Germany was the goal toward which ail our 
younger scholars ran their fastest race. Yet here 
was Professor Behrens, leaving a University not only 


European but German, from which our younger 
215 


216 RAW MATERIAL 


professors were proud to have a Ph.D. and deliber- 
ately choosing our new, raw, young institution for 
the sake of the free, untrammeled, democratic life 
in America. It went to our heads! 

Passages in his letter of acceptance were read to 
my mother by my father, who had borrowed the let- 
ter from the Chancellor. “I have a family of chil- 
dren and as they grow older I am more and more 
aware of the stifling, airless stagnation of European 
life. I want them to know something bigger and 
freer than will ever come to them in this Old World 
of rigid caste lines and fixed ideas. My wife and I, 
too, wish to escape from the narrowness of this pro- 
vincial town where an arrogant young lieutenant 
swaggering about in his gold-braided white broad- 
cloth uniform is much higher in social rank than 
the most learned and renowned member of the Uni- 
versity faculty; where a rich lumber-merchant, 
brutal and ignorant, can buy his way into political 
position and parade about with sash and gold chain 
and the insignia of the office of Mayor.” 

We were all righteously indignant over such ele- 
ments of life in Europe, and quite exalted in our 
certainty that the distinguished immigrant would 
find nothing like that in our midst. The sole and 
only representative of the military caste was the 


GOD’S COUNTRY 217 


lieutenant who drilled the university battalion, and 
he was a most unassuming young American who 
never on any occasion wore white broadcloth, put 
on his plain dark-blue uniform as seldom as possible, 
and for the most part wore a pepper-and-salt busi- 
ness suit and a derby hat. Since there were no trees 
on the Western plains, there was no equivalent to 
the iniquitous lumber merchant, the nearest ap- 
proach being a man who had made a good deal of 
money out of lucky guesses in real estate. But he 
would have dropped dead before putting on a sash 
and a gold chain. 

So we awaited the Behrens full of pride and pleas- 
ure. When they arrived, everybody in the faculty 
gave receptions and lunch-parties for them, and all 
we children rejoiced in the unlimited leavings of 
fried chicken (it was in September), ice cream, and 
cake, which were at our disposition after these “‘func- 
tions,” as the Faculty ladies called them. Although 
surprisingly unceremonious as to table manners, the 
Behrens were as nice as we expected to find them; 
and they were evidently delighted with the warm- 
hearted, open-handed good nature of Americans, by 
the cordiality of their reception (which seemed quite 
to amaze them) by the wide-open doors which led 
anywhere they might wish to go, by the absence of 


218 RAW MATERIAL 


class distinction, and by the generosity with which 
America supported universities, hospitals, libraries, 
and public schools. When the University opened, 
Professor Behrens threw himself into his teaching 
and soon became one of the favorite professors. He 
had a song sung about him at the winter concert of 
the Glee Club; and the Junior year-book was dedi- 
cated to him in the spring. By that time the Behrens 
children, who were in the eighth, fifth, and third 
grades of my public school were no longer to be dis- 
tinguished from the rest of us, running and yelling on 
the hard-beaten earth of the playground, and thor- 
oughly acquainted with duck-on-a-rock, prisoner’s 
base, and run-sheep-run. Julie and I were class- 
mates in the fifth grade that year, and the next and 
the next. 

But just as we were about to pass together into 
the exalted rank of the eighth grade, Professor Beh- 
rens received a call to be Rector (Julie explained to 
me that this had nothing to do with a church, but 
was the same as our Chancellor) of a university in 
his own country. 

It seemed such an advancement to be promoted 
from Professor to Chancellor that it was no sur- 
prise to have him accept, and to see Mrs. Behrens 
begin hastily to pack up the family belongings. But 


GOD’S COUNTRY 219 


what did surprise us was the sudden revelation 
brought out by this event, of a great home-sickness 
on the part of the Behrens to get back to a “civilized 
country.” This was one of the phrases Julie over- 
heard her father saying to her mother, which she re- 
peated to me, and I to my parents. A faculty circle 
gets its news by about the same channels as an army 
post or a village sewing circle. So by the time this 
remark had reached my parents it did not surprise 
them. The Behrens, although still heartily grate- 
ful for all the kindness that had been shown them, 
although still feeling a lively affection for the good- 
hearted qualities in American life, could not conceal 
their immense relief at the prospect of the change. 
Professor Behrens discussed the question with the 
open frankness of a scientist before a new phenome- 
non: “I had no idea, till I had to go without them, 
how vital to civilization are the finer shades, the 
polish, the stability, the decorum, which comes only 
with long life of a society in an old country. I had 
never thought of them, had always supposed, of 
course, they were to be found everywhere. It is not 
that I blame America for not having them... 
nothing but time can give them .. . but there is 
no denying that they give a different color to life, 
the same difference of color there is between camping 


220 RAW MATERIAL 


out in a cave, ever so fine and airy and open a cave, 
and living in a well-ordered house with the appur- 
tenances of civilization. There is a certain something 
which springs up from such niceties of life ...I 
can hardly wait to get home, and give a real dinner 
with well-trained servants, and cultivated, established 
guests who have had a social position for so long that 
it isa part of them. The crudeness, the abruptness, 
the roughness in human intercourse here! And the 
total lack on the part of people in the lower classes 
of any sense of the fitness of things! The conductor 
on the street-car slapped me on the back the. other 
day!” 

So we gave them a grand good-by reception in 
the gymnasium, and we faculty-children fairly swam 
in lemonade and wallowed in left-over cake. The 
faculty presented Professor Behrens with a beauti- 
fully bound edition of Emerson, and Mrs. Behrens 
with a little pearl pendant; and then they went 
away, and we supposed we would never see them 
again. 

Julie and I corresponded once in a while as chil- 
dren do, the letters growing less frequent as Julie 
evidently began to forget her English. Mrs. Beb- 
rens wrote back a round-robin letter or two to be 
passed about among her faculty friends, one of them 


GOD’S COUNTRY zat 


describing the splendid, ceremonious, Old-World 
way in which Professor Behrens was inducted into 
his new position. She spoke with special pride of 
the way in which both the military and municipal 
authorities of the town had turned out to do him 
honor, the soldiers, officers, and the Mayor of the 
town marching at the head of the procession, the 
latter in his bright sash and gold chain of office. It 
seemed to us we had heard something about that 
Mayor before, but we could not remember what it 
was. 

And then Julie forgot her English altogether, and 
Mrs. Behrens’ letters dwindled and there were none. 

I got on through the eighth grade and went into 
the University prep-school. After three years there, 
my father was called to a better position in another 
State University. As we were settling ourselves in 
the new home, what should we hear but that a dis- 
tinguished European scientist was about to be added 
to the faculty, none other than Professor Behrens. 

Foreigners, even distinguished ones, were more 
common in American faculties then than they had 
been seven years before; there was a large German 
Department, with many native German instructors; 
and the University was further east and hence not 
so open-heartedly welcoming. There was, therefore, 


222 RAW MATERIAL 


no such stir over the newcomers as on their first ar- 
rival although every one was very nice to them and 
the President’s wife had Mrs. Behrens stand by her 
in the receiving line at the first of the faculty re- 
ceptions. But the Behrens did not seem to notice 
that there was anything lacking in their treatment. 
You never saw people more delighted than they were 
to be back in America. 

“Tt was worse than I remembered,” Professor 
Behrens told my father. “After an experience of 
the free, breezy, self-respecting life in America it 
was simply unendurable. Suffocating, simply suffo- 
cating! With the most ridiculous caste spirit. 
Rusted to a stand-still with cock-sure conservatism! 
An instant, hermetic closing up of every pore at any 
mention of new possibilities for human nature, or 
for human organizations. And such absurd, stiff, 
artificial rules of conduct and precedence in society! 
Let me tell you an episode which wiil seem almost 
incredible to you, but which really decided us to 
come back here. At a garden party my wife... 
my wife! . .. seeing there the wife of the General 
commanding the troops in the town garrison and 
knowing her quite well, stepped across the lawn to 
speak to her, one lady to another. Will you believe 
it, because she had not waited till the General’s wife 


GOD’S COUNTRY 223 


had summoned her to her circle, my poor wife re- 
ceived a cold, unrecognizing stare, her outstretched 
hand was left hanging in the air, and the General’s 
wife turned her back on her. And when I was furi- 
ous and protested, I was made uncomfortable, seri- 
ously uncomfortable!”’ 

And Mrs. Behrens told my mother she had been 
horrified by the cold-hearted envy, hatred and mean- 
ness which lay underneath the polished manners of 
many of the people in their circle. ‘They do not 
wish you well. They wish you ill. They simply 
have no conception of the meaning of that American 
word ‘friendly.’ ” 

Julie was ready for the University, as I was, and 
we entered the Freshman class together. She was a 
very pretty girl, one of the brown-haired Teutons, 
who are so much finer and more neatly finished than 
the blonde ones, and she had her fair share of popu- 
larity. We were taken into the same fraternity, 
studied together, and were much in each other’s 
homes. I soon saw that the Behrens home was not 
altogether a light-hearted one. After the first flush 
of pleasure at being back had passed, a cloud of de- 
pression settled over them. Their sojourn in a more 
finished and stable, low-toned and nuanced civiliza- 
tion had put them all out of key for the loud- 


224) RAW MATERIAL 


mouthed, cheerful American tune. They found it 
shrill and noisy, and often stopped their ears against 
it. Heavens, they had not remembered that Ameri- 
can trades-people were so utterly mannerless! Nor 
that all Americans were so blackly ignorant of the 
arts! They had no interest in organized athletics, 
and very soon developed an active hostility for foot- 
ball because of the indisputable fact that the uni- 
versity world was so occupied with it, that nothing 
serious was done in classes until after Thanksgiving 
when the last game was played. The Behrens were 
musical and nobody in the city cared for music ex- 
cept the German-Americans in their shabby quar- 
ter at the other end of town, and they were fat gro- 
cers, saloon-keepers or foremen in factories, people 
with whom the Behrens could not dream of asso- 
ciating. They were really very miserable and lonely 
and disillusioned. 

When we were Seniors there came a wonderful 
offer from Germany: a very high Government posi- 
tion for Professor Behrens. I heard them discus- 
sing this with a certain indecision which I had never 
heard in their remarks before. They knew very 
well what was before them in Germany. But, oh, 
what was about them here! The very servant prob- 
lem alone made it impossible for civilized beings to 


GOD’S COUNTRY 2.25 


organize a livable existence in America. Not to 
speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges 
which rasped and fretted them at every turn. 

They finally decided to go, but their packing-up 
was conducted in a very different spirit from the first 
one I had seen. They had begun to divine that there 
was, in this business of looking for the ideal coun- 
try, something more than meets the eye. 


I happened to visit them a few years after this, 
just before I was married, and found them much 
dissatisfied with European life. Mrs. Behrens was 
nettled and fretted by the question of social prece- 
dence which was, so it seemed to her, constantly 
used to humiliate her; and the children were stifling 
in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically regulated 
corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off 
for a long walk one afternoon and told me something 
of her opinion of European young men, especially 
the officers whom for the most part she met in so- 
ciety, as they were the ones who had most leisure for 
afternoon and evening parties. “I can just tell you 
one thing,” she said with a grim accent and a hard- 
set jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an 
old maid!” 

But later on, when her mother and she were ex- 


226 RAW MATERIAL 


changing reminiscences about the difficulties of 
American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh, I 
couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no 
servant class!” 

Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just re- 
member the bath-rooms, and the vacuum cleaners, 
and the hot water.” 

It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much- 
traveled chairs and tables that I saw them patiently 
making ready for another journey. 


INHERITANCE 


ONE of my mother’s distant cousins was left a 
widow, years ago with no assets but the house she 
lived in, a savings-bank account, and a very pretty 
daughter, then eighteen years old. Cousin Hen- 
rietta’s decisions were always prompt. It took her 
about six weeks to sell the house, draw the money 
from the savings-bank and take her daughter to 
Europe. I think her intention probably was to give 
Ella the benefit of a year’s polish, and bring her back 
to the home market, her value enhanced by the repu- 
tation of her Continental “Education.” But the im- 
possible happened, as energetic women like Cousin 
Henrietta can occasionally make it happen. 
Through some chance connection at the pension in 
Florence, they made the acquaintance of a wealthy, 
middle-aged Tuscan, not the traditional European 
nobleman at all, but a swarthy, well-preserved man 
of the people, risen to wealth by his own exertions. 
He was presented to Ella and lost his head entirely 
over her pale blonde prettiness. He was fifty-five. 


They were married on her nineteenth birthday. 
aay, 


228 RAW MATERIAL 


Cousin Henrietta shared their married life with 
them, of course, although this did not last very long. 
Signor Cattaneo, as not infrequently happens to 
elderly husbands of very young wives, tried to renew 
his youth too rapidly. He danced all one evening 
with his bride, an exercise which his great bulk made 
extremely violent for him; stepped out upon a bal- 
cony with her, in a cool, damp wind, and died of 
double pneumonia at the end of a week. 

Cousin Henrietta still in charge of affairs, at once 
brought home to the God’s country of Chicago, the 
lovely, wealthy little widow. ‘They set up house- 
keeping on a grand scale with the money which was 
sent to them every month from the honest, conscien- 
tious Tuscan agent in Florence. The agent got it 
from the honest, conscientious Tuscan peasants, and 
they got it out of their bodies, sweating and toiling 
endlessly long hours in all weathers. Ella and Cousin 
Henrietta had everything they could think of, that 
money could buy; and presently Ella, wanting some- 
thing new, bought herself a husband. He did not 
turn out very well: Ella had done exactly as she 
pleased for too long to bother with a husband, and 
after a time they separated, though there was never 
any legal action taken, since Cousin Henrietta was 
an extremely orthodox church member, who disap- 


INHERITANCE 229 


proved of any laxity in the relations between the 
sexes. Divorce seemed to her such a laxity. 

Then Ella wanted to do as other wealthy and fash- 
ionable ladies do and learn how to ride. They 
bought, as usual, the best that money could buy, 
and this time it was a little too good for Ella; for 
the high-spirited thorough-bred took fright one day 
and, disregarding Ella’s amateur efforts to control 
him, ran away, threw Ella off and broke her poor 
little neck. 

Cousin Henrietta was horrified and scandalized 
to find that now Ella’s remote but still legal hus- 
band would inherit a very large proportion of the 
Italian property. Her whole soul and being rose up 
wildly in an understandable and instinctive protest 
against this iniquity. She simply could not believe 
that the law would countenance such a barefaced 
theft of other people’s property. She filled the news- 
papers and the courts with her clamor and made us 
all ashamed of the family name. But that was all 
the good it did her. Ella had not dreamed of mak- 
ing a will; Cousin Henrietta’s son-in-law had no 
reason to love his wife’s mother, and could see no 
reason why she had any more right to that fortune 
than he had. Neither can I, when it comes to that. 

Ella’s husband was rather dazed by his good luck 


230 RAW MATERIAL 


and made all haste to marry. But he did not make 
quite haste enough. That was one of the years when 
the influenza was going the rounds, and he died of 
it two days before his wedding, in spite of all the 
care of three trained nurses and a whole battery of 
consulting physicians. I never knew what became 
of his fiancée, but always wondered if she did not 
perhaps go to live with Cousin Henrietta, as being 
the only person who would entirely sympathize with 
her. 

So the Cattaneo fortune passed to the casual next- 
of-kin, who happened to be the only nephew of 
Ella’s husband, a young clerk of twenty. The honest 
conscientious agent in Florence, who was paid a 
small annual salary for his services, and who would 
have died before touching a penny not his, went on 
administering the Italian estate which was growing 
steadily in value all the time, and paying more in- 
come. He sent that income over to the new name 
and address in America. He was upheld in his 
meager, narrow, difficult life by feeling that he was 
living up to the fine old Tuscan code of honor; and 
he often told his children, who lacked schooling and 
opportunities he could have given them if he had 
had more money, that the best inheritance a father 
can leave his children is an unblemished name. 


INHERITANCE 231 


The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have 
something much more substantial as an inheritance 
than that. For the young man with a fortune was 
married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as 
he came of age. They have three children, who 
learned very young how to spend a great deal of 
money with great speed. The money which the 
Italian day-laborers and small-farmers earn by pa- 
tient endurance of hardships, by eating rough, poor, 
scanty food, by working their pregnant wives to the 
‘day before their confinements, by taking their chil- 
dren out of school before they can read, is sent 
month by month to America and spent in buying a 
new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young- 
lady daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for 
Ella’s husband’s nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, 
and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew from doing 
anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his 
cigars. 





THIRTY YEARS AFTER 


A LONG time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the 
height of his brilliant fame, and when I was a little 
girl, his daughter chanced to be a school-mate of 
mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was 
invited to their supper-table. I was very much im- 
pressed by the momentous occasion which it seemed 
to me, and I have not forgotten a word he said, nor 
a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I 
can still see his darkly handsome face, with his 
glossy black mane, his large bright eyes, his great 
curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I saw a human 
being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was 
at that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed 
as the greatest portrait painter in America, and he 
accepted this well-deserved reputation with no mock 
modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him 
coarsely vain or puffed up. It acted on him like a 
generous wine, made him extravagantly kind and 
over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told 
me that night that her princely father had been 
known to stop a tired coal-heaver at his work, hand 
233 


234. RAW MATERIAL 


him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He was like a 
great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear 
waters all who came near it, even the little school- 
girl at the other end of the table. 

But there were people he could not help to enjoy- 
ment. The name of one of them came up in the 
conversation that evening: ‘Poor old Hendricks!” 
said our host, ‘‘what can you do for the poor old 
chap? He doesn’t even know what hit him!” 

One of the younger painters there was a protége 
of Bellamy’s, admiring him so greatly that his 
paintings were scarcely to be told from his master’s. 
He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! 
He ought to be told to crawl into his hole and pull 
it in after him. Making a laughing-stock of himself 
with those sooty old landscapes of his, year after 
year.”’ 

Our host took a great draught of the beer in his 
stein, wiped his great mustache with his fine damask 
napkin, and turned comfortably in his chair, “Hen- 
dricks got me in a tight place the other day,” he 
began, “At this year’s exhibition he marched me up 
to one of his bitumen-black, woolly horrors, and 
said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell 
me what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It 
looks all right to me. I can’t see why they all jump 


THIRTY YEARS AFTER 235 


on me so. I look at theirs, and then I look at mine. 
. . . | can’t see what they’re talking about.’ ” 

“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated 
the disciple, very much astonished. ‘What did you 
say?” 

“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “TI didn’t 
want to hurt the old man’s feelings. I hadn’t sup- 
posed till then that he’d so much as noticed how 
people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain 
to him, of course. What’s the use? He can’t under- 
stand! If Id talked to him all day about what 
we’re after—light, and shimmer, and vibration— 
he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. 
If it were im him to understand, he’d die before he’d 
paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the 
back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. 
What makes you think there is anything the matter 
with your work?’ and pretended that somebody was 
calling to me from the other side of the gallery.” 

He finished his beer at a draught. He thought 
himself magnificently kind and tolerant. And so 
did we. 


That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be 
exact. The Bellamys took their little girl out of our 
school that spring, and I saw no more of them. But 


236 RAW MATERIAL 


I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight 
of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture- 
galleries always went to look at whichever bright, 
high-keyed, dashing portrait he was exhibiting that 
year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that 
they did not look just the same; and yet when I 
looked straight at them, I saw that they were, quite 
miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy flowing 
brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the 
ringing color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that 
bold flood of sunlight with which he had shocked 
and enchanted the early American public groping 
its way out from Munich. 

Presently, finding that the impression that they 
were different persisted, I set myself to analyze it, 
and found that their altered look came from the 
altered character of the paintings beside and above 
them . . . and then, as the years went on, below 
them! For the time came when the annual Bel- 
lamy portrait was not in the center of the last gal- 
lery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung 
high in one of the side-rooms. It looked very queer 
and matter-of-fact with its solid surfaces honestly 
rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd, 
subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative 
canvases about it. They took the eye far below the 


THIRTY YEARS AFTER 237 


surfaces they depicted. They suggested far more 
than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted 
you like an unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign 
language. The Bellamy canvas was in no unknown 
language, but in the speech used for the daily order 
to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It 
came finally to seem to me as literal and bald a state- 
ment of fact as a time-table. 

One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur 
Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, 
blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous can- 
vas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative 
beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices 
behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with 
a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the car- 
riage of a king was talking to a younger man, an 
unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill 
at ease. 

“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s 
all about. I honestly don’t know what you’re driving 
at, you kids. What’s the matter with good drawing? 
What do you want in a painting?” He waved a 
well-kept hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t 
there light in that? And space? And interesting 
composition? And true values? J ought to know 
a good painting when I see one. What are you boys 


238 RAW MATERIAL 


talking about when you slash at my things sop [’m 
not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve a right to 
your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what 
7s your opinion?” 

He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw 
note of hurt in his voice, and his eyes rested anx- 
iously on the young man beside him. 

The other looked every way except at him and 
said in a vague, hurried, kindly voice, “Why, Mr. 
Bellamy, your work is all right, of course. It’s fine. 
Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything. . . .” 


Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as 
I’m setting it down. 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 


STUDENTS and classifiers of American “types” often 
say that the grandfathers of the present generation 
of New Englanders represent the ‘New England 
type” much more accurately than their descendants 
of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean 
by “New England type.” Apparently they make 
the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded frigid- 
ity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous atti- 
tude towards human life and human nature, and a 
cold, calculating capacity to skin other people alive 
in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems 
to be that whatever else they were, New Englanders 
were always very much of the same sort. 
Here are my two New England grandfathers. 


Both of them had identically the same sort of 
ancestry, plain English people who came to the New 
World about the middle of the seventeenth century. 
Certain genealogically-minded members of the two 
families have gathered reverently together the 
scant tradition concerning the generations that 

239 


240 RAW MATERIAL 


bridge the two centuries and a half of life in 
America; but though I have dutifully plodded 
through the thick volumes of “family histories” I 
have never been able to see that any of my fore- 
bears did anything more than earn their own livings 
and keep out of jail. 

Younger branches of both families moved up into 
Vermont, after the end of the French-and-Indian 
wars and have lived here ever since. Both my 
grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. 
And there the resemblance ceases. 


One of them had, apparently, from early child- 
hood, a passion for books and learning and sophisti- 
cation and cultivation—and gregarious, articulate 
social existence—and dinner parties and black broad- 
cloth and white linen and good wine—and all the 
other elements in the sort of life which is not to be 
found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm, how- 
ever, seems to have presented him with some tools 
for getting what he wanted: a powerful great body, 
an active mind and an unlimited amount of dynamic 
energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 
1833) spurred on by the sympathy of a strong- 
minded mother. I have still in the attic of his old 
house, the little hair-covered trunk which he took 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 241 


with him, and which contained all his worldly pos- 
sessions. 

From that time on, until his old age, he never 
came home except to rest in the occasional, very 
brief intervals of incessant and almost appalling ac- 
tivity, both intellectual and physical. With only a 
little help from his family he earned his way through 
college, and then put himself through a Theological 
Seminary in record time. With him, as with other 
manifestants of the mid-century explosion of energy 
in America, it was as if the long generations of vege- 
tating country-dwellers had, like other vegetating 
matter of by-gone ages, turned to rich veins of highly 
combustible material, which this descendant of 
theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great 
shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He 
seems always to have been incandescent, the whole 
six-feet-three of him, with motive-power which he 
could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to 
cool off. All his life he burned hot with a vitality 
at which an ever-widening circle of other human 
beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned and 
ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. 
Even the people whom he furiously rubbed the 
wrong way (he had as many enemies as friends) 
were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life- 


242 RAW MATERIAL 


pace, a livelier circulation. The temperature in a 
room rose when he entered it. Even people of slug- 
gish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even coldly 
superior and skeptical people who prided themselves 
on being too disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over 
its issues, soon kindled either to intense exaspera- 
tion or lively personal affection. In either case, 
calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched 
and shaken. I have often thought with sympathy of 
the vestrymen in Grandfather’s various parishes. 
As a young clergyman he ran one parish after 
another, with increasing brio. When he settled 
down in the New York parish where he stayed for 
most of his life, he was already editing a church- 
paper and writing innumerable pamphlets, in addi- 
tion to his regular duties as rector. He now speeded 
up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, 
added one mission chapel after another to the church 
organization, pushed out the influence of the parish 
further and further, especially into the outlying 
regions of the slums, which because of their very 
discouraging aspect of poverty and foreignness had 
been till then safe from attempts to improve them. 
Of course I knew my grandfather only when he 
was a very old man, long after he had retired from 
active life; but I never got from him the slightest 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 243 


impression that he was what is known as a “re- 
ligious-minded person” or that all this remarkable 
expansion of church and mission work came entirely 
from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember 
Grandfather, you never would dream that he had 
been a minister at all. My guess is that he devel- 
oped that church as his contemporaries developed 
their transcontinental systems of railways, because 
he was born with a clutch that never slipped, so that 
all the power he created by his many-cylindered 
motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels 
which sent him with extreme rapidity along the 
road he had chanced to follow. 

He not only developed the parish, he developed 
his own life: he bought books, unendingly bought 
books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English. No 
junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us 
entirely of this vast accumulation of serious-minded 
books of research, now quite worthless, all of them, 
full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship of 
his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, 
upon European culture, with his formidable New- 
World capacity for the assimilation of Gargantuan 
meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the say- 
ing goes, and gave his son university life and Euro- 
pean travel. He lived as he had wanted to live, with 


244 RAW MATERIAL 


friends and acquaintances in three countries, dress- 
ing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white 
linen; his house was lined with well-bound books; 
he was a famous talker—in the vein of Dr. John- 
son—much sought after for his brilliantly amusing 
conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed 
his prototype into rather overpowering monologue; 
he was a powerful and very fluent public speaker 
—we have chests and chests full of his sermons 
still in the attic—and so far as I can gather he 
no more doubted the ultimately satisfying value of 
all these things as an integral part of life than Mr. 
Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately 
satisfying value of squeezing the last penny of in- 
terest out of a loan, or Barnum to have doubted the 
worthwhileness of running the biggest show on 
earth. 

It would be very unfair to give the impression 
that his agreeable social life and the possession of 
objects and books then in fashion made up the whole 
or even the largest part of his life. It took such a 
formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge 
appetite for life and activity, that it would be 
difficult to catalog them all. Controversy, for 
instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was known 
as one of the leading controversialists of his time. 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 245 


He was a heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps 
the real passion of his passionate life was his hot- 
blooded detestation of formalism in religious beliefs. 
Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks 
on High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its 
fol-de-rols (as he called them) of salvation by in- 
cense and candles and twiddling distinctions between 
green and blue and yellow stoles. 

Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal 
theological points led him late in life, to disagree 
vigorously with the majority of his parishioners on 
several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform 
to the strict pattern they wished to impose upon 
him, he blew up with an explosion, shook the dust 
of his religious vocation off his feet, and retired to 
the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he 
spent his old age, living comfortably on his small 
savings. He took with him all the possessions he 
had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books, his 
substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which 
had been painted of his vivid, handsome face in 
middle-life, his gold-headed cane, his great black- 
silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical linen. 
When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept 
out of an excellent bed a single night in all his life. 


246 RAW MATERIAL 


The other grandfather fared forth at about the 
same date or a little earlier, and at about the same 
age; but not in search of well-set dinner-tables nor 
well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture 
from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his 
life to have been engaged in running away from 
even the light and sketchy approximation to im- 
prisoning regularity which was shown by the Amer- 
ica of that day and the State of his birth. Like 
an unbroken colt who snorts and wheels and dashes 
away at the mere’ sight of some one emerging from 
the barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave 
one look at what seemed to him the penitentiary- 
like pressure of conventional life and ran away 
with all the speed of what turned out to be a re- 
markably fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he 
ran away from his perfectly comfortable home, 
where he had been well cared for, and soundly if 
plainly educated. Disdaining ...no, more than 
that, courting hardship, as he always did, he roamed 
out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom of early 
frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went 
in ragged buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, 
and grew up to a great height and great strength, and 
was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some 
time during this period he acquired, with character- 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 247 


istic casual ease, the profession of surveyor, the only 
one of the trades or professions at which he was 
willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of 
unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all 
of it in the new, untracked wilderness which he 
loved. 

He seems always to have despised physical com- 
fort as a clumsy trap laid by life to catch you and 
hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated the 
very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening 
weight of material possessions. A gun (which like 
other frontiersmen of that day he passionately and 
personally loved), an ax (with which he could per- 
form almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the 
tools of his wildwoods profession, and the world 
before him, full, intoxicatingly full of untrodden 
paths leading into bright enticing danger. Pros- 
perity? A home of his own? Above all, regular 
work? Never, as long as there were squirrels and 
deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters 
withal! 

His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river 
and lake settlements of which were at that time hor- 
ribly marshy and fever-ridden. ‘There he encoun- 
tered the lure which brings most young adventurers 
in under a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell in 


248 RAW MATERIAL 


love. A pretty Vermont girl was visiting some cou- 
sins there and had set up a little millinery shop, 
where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the 
period. Do you see them, the tall, big-boned sur- 
veyor, with his magnetic personality, pungent with 
the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white- 
fingered little amateur milliner? 

She went back to Vermont to her family, and he 
followed her. I have often amused myself by walk- 
ing around over the roads and paths and fields he 
must have trod during his wooing, and trying to 
imagine his impatience of the cribbed and cabined 
superfluity and conventionality of the Vermont life, 
which looked so primitive and bare to my other 
grandfather. 

He endured it for some months, till his wooing 
was successful, and, just after her twenty-first birth- 
day, the gentle, home-loving girl put her hand upon 
his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. 
This was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild in- 
deed. My great-uncle, who was her little brother 
at that time conceived a lifelong admiration and 
affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero 
who came to take away his big sister. He used 
to tell me stories of that impetuous wooing, and of 
the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 249 


mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and 
disappearance of this startling, unreliable, danger- 
ously alive personality, living so immorally free 
from all the rules and possessions and standards 
which bore them down to the earth, and to which 
they so tenaciously clung. My great-uncle always 
ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom he 
never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He 
was a talented man, with a powerful personality, 
who could have done anything he chose.” He also 
told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a 
wild, free son of Nature.” I take it the minister 
had had some contact with the romantic-school 
phraseology so much in fashion at that date. 

It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl 
had chosen, full of extravagant hardships and priva- 
tions of which she could never have dreamed. They 
lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, al- 
ways as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it 
was possible to take a family of young children, for 
they had five little girls by the time they had been 
married a decade. Once or twice her husband made 
an attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a 
frontier settlement, to take an everyday job; but 
these trials never lasted long, and their old life was 
taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings 


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in the primeval forest, days when there was nothing 
but corn-meal in the pantry, long treks in covered 
wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague which 
burned and ravaged them; never more possessions 
than could be drawn by a team of lean horses, .. . 
and always unbroken love and devotion between the 
two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for 
a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, 
because he was there; his vitality, his free-hearted 
zest in whatever came to them, bore her along like 
a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she wor- 
shipped the memory of his deep, never-wavering 
passion for her. 

You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do 
family thought he took a very queer way to show it, 
and with Yankee out-spokenness told them both so, 
as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without 
a hesitation she flung her family ties away along 
with her love of home, her woman’s love for stability, 
her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not tiil 
long after his death did she again resume relations 
with her family. 

Her little girls, never having known any other life, 
saw nothing unusual in the one they led, especially 
‘as their mother, her personality doubled and trebled 
by the exigencies of her life, stood, somehow, miracu- 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 251 


lously between them and the most impossible of the 
hardships to which their father so light-heartedly 
condemned them. They were always dressed in well- 
mended garments, they had shoes and stockings, 
they were clean and cherished, there was always 
cheer and loving-kindness between their father and 
mother, and when there was only corn-meal mush 
for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of the 
old songs and stories of which their mother had such 
a store. My mother sang them to me, and I now 
sing them to my children, those old folk-songs with 
which my grandmother charmed away hunger from 
her little children. They adored their great, rol- 
licking father, always in high spirits, and they pre- 
ferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews which were 
the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the 
tough, stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet 
of the other frontier children. One of my mother’s 
vivid recollections is of looking out of the window 
on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father 
emerge from the woods into the clearing, carrying 

. a very Robin Hood . .. a whole deer’s car- 
cass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down be- 
fore the door and called, like a great boy, for his 
women-folk to come and admire him! She says she 
can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on the 


252 RAW MATERIAL 


snow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, 
laughing face. 

Of course, when the news of gold in California 
came, burning-hot like wild-fire from the west, he 
was one of the first to go. He would be. A distant, 
uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown 
country; could he resist such an alluring combina- 
tion? Of course, he could have resisted it if he had 
tried; but he did not try. He never tried. 

Also, of course, it was really out of the question 
to transport a wife and five little girls across an un- 
tracked continent, full of Indians. He was to go 
alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, 
and come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the 
family out in a ship around the Horn. It was all 
settled in his mind as if the gold were heavy in his 
pockets. The separation would be short .. . he 
was sure of it, as he was always sure of whatever 
would ensure his being free of the slightest con- 
straint. . . . He moved his family into the nearest 
settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added 
a small sum that had just come to him as his share 
of his father’s small property, and got together 
enough to support his family for a year. It took lit- 
tle enough, as they had always lived. And he would 


“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 253 


be back before the year was out, rolling in gold. 

With empty pockets and a high heart he took his 
gun and his ax, kissed his family good-by and went 
away planning to live off the country as he traveled, 
as he always had. 

One letter came back from California, the only 
one he ever wrote, since he had never before been’ 
separated from the one human being he had loved. 
He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting 
out there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears 
—all the regulation accompaniments of the trans- 
continental trip in 1849. He struck it rich at once, 
and as one of the first on the ground had a wonder- 
ful claim of his own. They would all be rich in no 
time. 

In no time he was dead. 

For an interminable period his wife heard noth- 
ing, and then, very vaguely, that he had died of 
“mountain fever.” He had been dead and buried 
for months before she learned that she was a widow 
at thirty-two with five helpless little girls and not 
a penny in the world. 





OCTOBER, 1918 


MORNING 


I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped 
for an instant, fascinated by the sinister expression 
of an immense cannon, painted in serpentine streaks 
and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted by an 
explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down 
like a broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn 
around. The elegant old man who was an American 
correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up 
with an expression of approval. ‘Magnificent dis- 
play, isn’t it?” he said, waving his hand towards the 
ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses, stand- 
ing thick on the public square. ‘Why didn’t you 
bring your children?” 


The gulf between his generation and mine yawned 
deep. I told myself the part of wisdom was to close 
my lips on what I felt. But the cannon leered at 
me too insolently, with its torn muzzle. 

I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police 
seem to be getting the better of a band of ruffians 

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who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I don’t take 
the children to see the bloody clubs with which . . .” 

“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Femi- 
nine emotionality! These don’t look much like 
bloody clubs. They look more like part of a steel- 
foundry.” 

‘“‘Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, 
spattered with human brains, and stands in a pool 
of human blood, if we only had eyes to see!” I said 
moderately. 

“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gen- 
tleman, forgetting his usual politeness to women. 

“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans 
was in forcing a war on a world that has outgrown 
war! If war is so hateful a thing, why complacently 
lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”’ 

“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, 
“because they have been instruments of righteous- 
ness!” (For the moment he had forgotten the na- 
tionality of the cannon about us.) 

“Have they?” I asked. ‘“They’re German cannon, 
remember.” In spite of my feeling sick, I could not 
but laugh at the change in his expression. I went 
on, ‘Well, even if they had been sacred Allied can- 
non, they’d be instruments of torture all the same. 
I thought we were fighting to put such things on the 


OCTOBER, 1918 257 


scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide 
them from view? We don’t put the offal from our 
slaughter-houses on public view.” 

“Vegetarianism, next?” 

“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the 
children to see the steers killed.” 

“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, 
“that women have a traditional right to be illogical, 
but really. . . . Did you, or did you not turn your 
personal life upside down to do your share in this 
war? It would give me brain fever to feel two dif- 
ferent ways about the same thing.” 

“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk 
comes roaring down our street. Who wouwldn’t feel 
two ways about him? I certainly do. First, I know 
that society has been wrongly organized to permit 
any boy to grow up crazed with whiskey; and sec- 
ond, I know that my children must be protected, 
now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead 
isn’t going to help the general situation at all. If we 
are not to have a perpetual procession of crazy- 
drunk men coming down our street (and our own 
men among them) we must change the organization 
of society by long, patient, and constructive efforts. 
In the meantime with the drunken man pounding on 
my door, if the police don’t do what is necessary, 


258 RAW MATERIAL 


why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding 
water down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest 
of my life making speeches about the dishpan.” 

My sophisticated old friend had for me the smil- 
ing amusement one feels for a bright child talking 
about what he does not understand. Taking up the 
sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at 
the root of the matter, ““No, my dear girl, no, you 
don’t. A well-meaning, high-principled woman like 
you, can do a great deal, but she cannot amputate a 
vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, 
brave men ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for 
you you can’t, for if you did, there would be nobody 
to stand between you and the bullies. Take it from 
a man nearly twice your age, that without the sol- 
dier in every man (and that means love of force 
and submission to force—you must swallow that! ) 
there would be no order in the world. You needn’t 
fry to reduce that element of force to mere business- 
like police-work. It can’t be done. There would 
Se anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t 
believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your woman- 
ush, preconceived notions. But it doesn’t make any 
difference whether you believe it or not. Such are 
the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change 
them.” 


OCTOBER, 1918 259 


I turned and left him. I did not believe a word 
he said, of course ... but... . There zs a horri- 
ble side to human nature. ... Suppose that to 
hold it in check it might be necessary .. . 


AFTERNOON 


“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go- 
round in the Parc of the Chateau is running. 
Couldn’t you take us?” 

We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed 
the arid, bare Place d’Armes where the great Louis 
had mustered his troops, hobbled up over the villain- 
ous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and 
came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primi- 
tive circle of wooden horses whirled slowly about, as 
a one-armed soldier turned the crank. I was left on 
a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching 
our children’s pleasure. 

My two were at once in another world—Jimmy’s 
a mere wide world of enchantment, as befitted his 
five-year-old ignorance. He swam through the air, 
a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat 
very straight, one hand on her hip, the other 
stretched out in a gesture of command. She was 
perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, 


260 RAW MATERIAL 


or possibly Joan of Arc at Orleans. Sally’s class at 
school begins to have some notions of history. 
When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had 
paid our copper sous, we wandered on, to a bench in 
front of a statue of mellow marble. Here I sat down 
while the children ran about, shouting and kicking 
up the chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth- 
of-gold under their feet. Their laughter sounded 
distant in my ears. I was hearing again the cock- 
sure old voice of the morning. ... “Anarchy in a 
moment if respect for force were eliminated ... 


you cannot amputate a part of human nature .. .” 


What was my little daughter saying, with her 
amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you 
know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this 
made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in 
school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had 
all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, 
and the water brought here. ... It cost millions 
and millions.” 

Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak 
over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these 
around with you?” he asked. 

“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. 


OCTOBER, 1918 261 


They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny 
little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school 
that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully 
ugly!” 

“YT wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy. 

Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, 
you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance 
to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We 
never could have got in. They had soldiers at all 
the gates to keep people out.” 

Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. 
There were some things too tall to be believed, even 
if Sally did say them. “What was it for, if nobody 
was allowed in?” 

“Tt was for the king. Everything was for the 
king then. And he only let in his own family and 
his special friends.” 

“YT should think people would ha’ been mad to 
see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy 
said vigorously. 

“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. 
“They thought it had to be that way. All the 
learned men in those days told them that everything 
would go to pieces and everybody would rob and 
murder everybody else if they didn’t have a king 


262 RAW MATERIAL 


and think they loved him more than anybody else.” 

Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose 
up to protest, “They didn’t Jove that old hog-it-all 
king!” The little twentieth-century American brain 
refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently im- 
possible idea. 


(. . . and yet how many generations of men suf- 
fered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and 
inevitable foundation of society! ) 


“Well, they thought they had to, and so they 
thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we 
love our governments now. But after a couple of 
hundred years or so they found out the learned men 
didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a 
king that kept folks from robbing and murdering 
all the time. So they got together and came out 
here from Paris and took all this away from him. 
And that’s how we get in to play.” 

Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet 
he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.” 

Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t 
he though! Suppose he should come walking right 
down those marble steps with his high wig and his 
big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and 


OCTOBER, 1918 263 


diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us 
and say, “You good-for-nothing common-people, 
what are you doing in My park? I'll have you 
boiled in oil at once!” 

Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big 
sister’s hand and said in rather a small voice, ““What 
would you say back?” 

Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, 
‘Get away from here, you old King. Don’t you 
know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know 
ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right 
through him, gold clothes and diamonds and all, like 
this.” 

She executed a headlong assault on space and 
came back laughing. 

Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, ‘“‘Yes,” he said 
swaggering, “I would too, I’d say, ‘You old King, 
you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through him too.” 

It was the most delightful of all the games Sally © 
had invented. They went at it with gusto, their 
faces rosy and laughing as they took turns in dash- 
ing through the non-existent might, majesty, and 
glory of a dead idea. 


It was a game which amused their mother quite 
as much as the children. I sat watching them at it, 


264 RAW MATERIAL 


till it was time to start home back through the rich 
magnificence of the old park which had been planted 
for a king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, 
purposeful centuries had grown to beauty for the 
people. 


A BRETON AMONG HSU HSI 


Tue black-and-white maid told me I was expected 
and showed me into the drawing-room to wait. As 
I waited I looked around at the beautiful room with 
the leaden depression which such beautiful rooms 
always produce in me. It was a wonderfully elabo- 
rate composition with as many details in it as there 
are notes on a page of music, and every one of them 
was correct and accredited. As I stepped in through 
the door the whole shouted in my ears a pean of 
religiously devout acceptance of the fashion then 
prevailing in interior decoration. 

The floor was dully lustrous, avoiding the vulgar 
shininess of varnish so esteemed a decade or so be- 
fore. There was a great deal of black in all the 
fabrics as was then the fashion (now it would be ver- 
milion and verdigris green); chintz curtains with a 
black background and a splashingly-colored design 
of wreaths and strange large birds; black satin sofa- 
pillows, with stiff quilled ruffles in brilliant colors 
to match the birds. The shades of the electric lights 
(which were of course designed to make them look 


like candles) were ornamented with cut-out black 
265 


266 RAW MATERIAL 


silhouettes of nude ladies with extremely long legs. 
The furniture was either all “antique” or had been 
doctored to look as though it were. A large, dark, 
carved chest stood against a wall—to contain what it 
was difficult to conjecture. The chairs had the cor- 
rect kind of legs and backs and arms, that is, the 
kind that had not yet been copied sufficiently to spoil 
it for the discerning taste; and the straight, curi- 
ously-shaped table was at least two jumps ahead of 
anything shown at that time even by the most enter- 
prising department-store. The walls, in accordance 
with the order of the day, were for the most part 
smartly and knowingly bare, with a few permissible 
reproductions of Chinese landscapes; one a tall, nar- 
row study of bamboo shoots, another a long, narrow 
study of snowy mountains, depicted in three or four 
lines (this year it would be, I suppose, an 1858 
panel by Jolly). 

I sat down in what looked like the most com- 
fortable of the distinguished chairs, my feet on one 
of the correctly Oriental rugs, and looked dispiritedly 
about me for some sign of living taste in all that 
tastefully arranged room. There was plenty of taste 
shown there; but it smelled so of the pages of an 
expensive magazine printed on highly-glazed paper, 
that presently, as I sat there, despairing of my race, 


A BRETON AMONG HSU HSI 267 


I felt my own body take on the same flat, two-di- 
mensional unreality. Well, that is the sort of flat 
and unreal creatures human beings are when it comes 
to taste, I reflected. 

There was not, so far as I could see, one single 
object in that room (and God knows there were 
plenty of objects in it!) which rang out with the 
clear, brave note of a thing chosen because it gives 
pleasure. Everything about me wore a large, invisi- 
ble but plainly legible placard, setting forth that it 
was there because it was “the thing”; and that the 
instant ‘“‘the thing” was something else it would be 
cast out and replaced with something else as mean- 
ingless as itself in the life of the owner. 

The whole expensive show was perched on the 
branch of other people’s opinions, and was ready 
to fall to the ground as soon as that branch waved 
in the wind of a new fashion. There was not one 
object which suggested what you might think would 
be the first, simple, hearty, healthy instinct of pros- 
pering humanity, the desire to surround itself with 
what it likes, No, in its abject consistency, the 
room shamelessly proclaimed that its ambition was 
to be well thought of by “people in the know” and 
not at all to please the family who had paid for it 
and had to live with it. 


268 RAW MATERIAL 


Docility in human beings is always a dreadful 
quality, but docility in matters of taste is shameful. 
I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what looked like a 
Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remem- 
bered. But an ordinary private family would be as 
little likely to own a real Chardin as a real Veer- 
meer. I reflected that as soon as it was discovered 
not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent 
off to the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful 
canvas, apparently by some one of the period who 
had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as 
we do. If it looked so much like a Chardin that 
only the X-ray could tell the difference, why wasn’t 
it as good as a Chardin? I fell into a meditation on 
the hideous ways of collectors of pictures, blasphem- 
ers against the Holy Ghost of Art that they are. 
Ostensibly they buy pictures because they love good 
paintings (I am not referring to art dealers/). A 
collector sees a small canvas, said to be a Teniers, 
and is ready to pay a fantastic price for it, enough 
to endow a school for all time. Some expert with a 
chemical test proves that it is not a Teniers. It is 
the same picture as before, the very same; but now 
the lover of good art would not hang it on his walls, 
if it were given to him. 

What kind of a race is that to belong to, I asked 


A BRETON AMONG HSU HSI 269 


myself plaintively. They don’t want beauty, they 
don’t want art, they haven’t even the plain courage 
that any dog or monkey has, to want what they 
want. They want what other people pretend to 
want. 

I got up restlessly, crossed over to the other side 
of the room, turned my eyes to the side I had left, 
and was electrified. There in the center of the wall, 
next to a small reproduction of a Madhu camel- 
fight, was a large canvas, a solidly painted, honest, 
dark, sentimental Jules Breton. I gazed at it with 
profound thankfulness. There was not an extenu- 
ating circumstance. It was his usual peasant girl, 
done with his usual psuedo-realism, with her usual 
bare feet, every muddy toe conscientiously drawn, 
and it had darkened to the usual Breton gloom. It 
swore at the top of its voice at all the knowing, 
Orientalized, simplified, subtle things about it, and 
my heart leaped up to hear it swear. For it sounded 
like a living voice. 

Here was something that must have been bought 
some time ago (for nobody can actually have bought 
a Breton recently), which must have been hung on 
the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had 
not been banished when the style had changed! 

And yet the rest of the room told me unmistaka- 


270 RAW MATERIAL 


bly that the owner of that room knew as well as any 
one else what was now thought of that Breton by 
people ‘in the know.” 

Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. 
Never before had I thought to admire so ardently 
the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface of a Breton. 
But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no 
reason for its presence except that somebody liked 
it enough to keep it in spite of what other people 
thought. Well, now—I took heart—maybe the situ- 
ation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps 
we may have a live national taste in art, twenty or 
more generations later on. If there was anybody 
not an artist himself, who had the honesty and 
courage which must be at the foundation of anything 
alive in artistic taste, why perhaps... 

Just then a dreadful possibility came into my 
mind—perhaps it had been a wedding present from 
a wealthy uncle not to be offended? 

On this my host and hostess came in. As we 
talked of the object of my visit (which had nothing 
to do with art) I was constantly spying on the ex- 
pression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half- 
despairingly to the sound of their voices, watching 
feverishly every turn of expression in their kind, 
honest faces. I had never seen them before that day 


A BRETON AMONG HSU HSI 271 


and probably shall have no occasion to see them 
again. But I often think of them and wonder about 
them. They really looked as though they might be 
capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no 
longer in fashion. Perhaps they had kept that 
Breton on their walls out of sheer, honest, brave, 
artistic integrity. ... 

But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it 
seems. 





ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 
b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874 


OF course I never saw her. She died years before I 
was born. But she left behind her a portrait so full 
of her personality that no living figure is more 
human to me than my great-grandmother. 

I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining- 
room mantelpiece, showing her as a withered old 
woman in a frilled cap, which is now the only tangi- 
ble sign of her existence left in her old home. No; 
that might have been-any withered old woman in a 
frilled cap. 

There is another portrait of my great-grand- 
_ mother not done on canvas with oils. Here are some 
of the strokes which one by one, at long intervals, 
as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me. 


When I was about eight years old, I went out one 
day to watch old Lemuel Hager, who came once a 
year to mow the grass in the orchard back of the 
house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ring- 
ing steel of his scythe, he looked down at me and 

273 


244 RAW MATERIAL 


remarked: “You favor the Hawley side of the 
family, don’t you? There’s a look around your 
mouth sort o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother 
—no—my sakes, you must be her great-granddaugh- 
ter! Wa’l—think of that! And it don’t seem 
more’n yesterday I saw her come stepping out 
same’s you did just now; not so much bigger’n you 
are this minute, for all she must have been sixty 
years old then. She always was the littlest woman. 
But for all that she marched up to me, great lum- 
mox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true, what I hear 
folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of 
school without having learned how to read?’ And 
I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to tell the truth, I never 
did seem to git the hang of books, and I never could 
_ seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’ 

“And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of 
eighteen in the town J live in is a-goin’ to grow 
up without he knows how to read the Declaration 
of Independence,’ says she. And she made me 
stop work for an hour—she paid me just the same 
for it—took me into the house, and started teach- 
ing me. 

“Great land of love! if the teacher at school had 
‘a’ taught me like that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I 
felt as though she’d cracked a hole in my head and 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 275 


was just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel. 
And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found 
out ’twas my eyes the trouble. I’m terrible near- 
sighted. Well, that was before the days when every- 
body wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs 
for me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She 
just grabbed up a sort of magnifying-glass that she 
used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes were 
kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I'll take 
bigger stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches 
don’t matter so much as reading for an American 
citizen.’ 

“Well,.sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to 
practice to home with my magnifying-glass, and it 
was years before I could git by the house without 
Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to 
me, that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in 
for a minute and let me hear you read.’ Sometimes 
it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’ thinkin’ 
she could make everybody stand ’round. And some- 
times it made me laugh, she was so old, and not much 
bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I l’arned to read, and 
I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t 
never set down in the evening and open up the 
Necronsett ‘Journal’ without I think of Aunt Almera 
Canfield.” 


276 RAW MATERIAL 


One day I was sent over to Mrs. Pratt’s to get 
some butter, and found it just out of the churn. So 
I sat down to wait till Mrs. Pratt should work it 
over, munching on a cookie, and listening to her 
stream of talk—the chickens, the hail-storm of the 
other day, had my folks begun to make currant 
jelly yet? and so on—till she had finished and was 
shaping the butter into beautiful round pats. ‘This 
always puts me in mind of Aunt Almera,” she said, 
interrupting an account of how the men had chased 
a woodchuck up a étrvee—who ever heard of such a 
thing? “Whenever I begin to make the pats, I re- 
member when I was a girl working for her. She 
kept you right up to the mark, I tell you, and you 
ought to have seen how she lit into me when she 
found out some of my butter-pats were just a little 
over a pound and some a little less. It was when 
she happened to have too much cream and she was ° 
‘trading in’ the butter at the store. You’d have 
thought I’d stolen a fifty-cent piece to hear her go 
on! ‘I sell those for a pound; they’ve got to be a 
pound,’ says she, the way she always spoke, as 
though that ended it. 

“ “But land sakes, Mis’ Canfield,’ says I, all out o’ 
patience with her, ‘an ounce or two one way or the 
other—it’s as likely to be more as less, you know! 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 177 


What difference does it make? Nobody expects 
to make their pats just a pound! How could 
you?’ 

““Flow could you? How could you?’ says she. 
‘Why, just the way you make anything else the way 
it ought to be—by keeping at it till it 7s right. What 
other way is there?’ 

“YT didn’t think you could do it. I knew you 
couldn’t; but you always had to do the way Mis 
Canfield said, and so I began grumbling under my 
breath about high-handed, fussy old women. But 
she never minded what you said about her, so long 
as you did your work right. So I fussed and fussed, 
clipping off a little, and adding on a little, and 
weighing it between times. It was the awfulest 
bother you ever saw, because it spoiled the shape 
of your pat to cut at it so much, and you had to 
start it over again every time. 

“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, how soon I got 
the hang of it! She’d made me think about it so 
much, I got interested, and it wasn’t any time at all 
before I could tell the heft of a pat to within a frac- 
tion of an ounce just by the feel of it in my hand. 
And I never forgot it. You never do forget that 
kind of thing. I brought up my whole family on 
that story. ‘Now you do that spelling lesson just 


278 RAW MATERIAL 


exactly right,’ Vd say to my Lucy, ‘just the way 
Aunt Almera made me do the butter pats!’ ” 


I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, try- 
ing to make a willow whistle, when the janitor came 
along and opened the door. ‘The Ladies’ Aid are 
going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he 
explained, getting out a broom. I wandered in to 
visit with him while he swept and dusted the pleas- 
ant little community sitting-room where our village 
social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair 
and wiped off the frame of the big portrait of Lin- 
coln. “Your great-grandmother gave that, do you 
know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the 
broom for a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did 
you ever hear how Aunt Almera got folks stirred up 
to do something about this room? Well, ’twas 50 
like her! ‘The place used to be the awfulest hole 
you ever saw. Years ago they’d used it to lock up 
drunks in, or anybody that had to be locked up. 
Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began 
to take prisoners down there. But nobody did any- 
thing to this room to clean it up or fix it. It belongs 
to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do any- 
thing that they think they can put off on the town. 
The women used to talk a lot about it—what a nice 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 279 


place ’twould be for socials, and how ’twould keep 
the boys off the streets, and how they could have 
chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this 
room was fixed up. But whose business was it to 
fix it up? The town’s of course! And of course 
nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there 
is to the town. No, they just jawed about it, and 
kept saying ‘wa’n’t the selectmen shiftless because 
they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the selectmen 
didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in 
the law about using tax money to fix up rooms for 
sociables, is there? And those were awful tight 
times, when money came hard and every cent of 
tax money had to be put to some good plain use. 
So the selectmen said they couldn’t do anything. 
And nobody else would, because it wasn’t anybody’s 
business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put 
upon and made to do more than his share. And the 
room got dirtier and dirtier, with the lousy old mat- 
tress the last drunk had slept on right there on the 
floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden 
boxes, and dust and dry leaves that had blown in 
through the windows when the panes of glass were 
broken—regular dumping-ground for trash. 

“Well, one morning bright and early—I’ve heard 
my mother tell about it a thousand times—the first 


280 RAW MATERIAL 


person that went by the Town Hall seen the door 
open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, 
and there was little old Aunt Almera, in a big ging- 
ham apron, her white hair sticking out from under- 
neath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning 
away to beat the band. She looked up, saw him 
standing and gaping at her, and says, just as though 
that was what she did every day for a living, ‘Good 
morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’ 

“He went away kind of quick, and told about her 
over in the store, and they looked out, and sure 
enough out she come, limping along (she had the 
rheumatism bad) and dragging that old mattress 
with her. She drug it out in front to a bare place, 
and poured some kerosene on it and set fire to it; 
and I guess by that time every family in the street 
was looking out at her from behind the window- 
shades. Then she went back in, leaving it there 
burning up, high and smoky, and in a minute out 
she came again with her dustpan full of trash. She 
flung that on the fire as if she’d been waiting all her 
life to have the chance to get it burned up, and 
went back for more. And there she was, bobbing 
back and forth all the fore part of the morning. 
Folks from the Lower Street that hadn’t heard about 
it would come up for their mail, and just stop dead, 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 281 


to see the bonfire blazing and Aunt Almera limping 
out with maybe an old broken box full of junk in her 
arms. She’d always speak up just as pleasant and 
gentle to them—that made ’em feel queerer than 
anything else. Aunt Almera talking so mild! ‘Well, 
folks, how are you this morning?’ she’d say. ‘And 
how are all the folks at home?’ And then slosh! 
would go a pail of dirty water, for as soon as she 
got it swept out, didn’t she get down on her creaking 
old marrow-bones and scrub the floor! All that af- 
ternoon every time anybody looked out, splash! 
there’d be Aunt Almera throwing away the water 
she’d been scrubbing the floor with. Folks felt about 
as big as a pint-cup by that time, but nobody could 
think of anything to do or say, for fear of what 
Aunt Almera might say back at them, and every- 
body was always kind o’ slow about trying to stop 
her once she got started on anything. So they just 
kept indoors and looked at each other like born 
fools, till Aunt Almera crawled back home. It 
mighty nigh killed her, that day’s work. She was all 
crippled up for a fortnight afterwards with rheuma- 
tism. But you’d better believe folks stirred around 
those two weeks, and when she was out and around 
again there was this room all fixed up just the way 
‘tis now, with furniture, and the floor painted, and 


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white curtains to the windows, and all. Nobody 
said a word to her about it, and neither did she say 
a word when she saw it—she never was one to do 
any crowing over folks—once she’d got her own 


way.” 


The hassocks in our pew began to look shabby, 
and my aunt brought them home from church to 
put fresh carpeting on them. They suggested 
church, of course, and as she worked on them a great 
many reminiscences came to her mind. Here is one: 
“TI used to love to ride horseback, and grandmother 
always made father let me, although he was afraid 
to have me. Well, one summer evening, right after 
supper I went for a little ride, and didn’t get home 
till about half-past seven. As I rode into the yard 
I looked through the open windows, and there was 
grandmother putting her bonnet on; and it came to 
me in a flash that I’d promised to go to evening 
prayers with her. I was a grown-up young lady 
then, but I was scared! You did what you’d prom- 
ised grandmother you would, or something hap- 
pened. So I just fell off my horse, turned him out 
in the night pasture, saddle and all, and ran into the 
house. Grandmother was putting on her gloves, and, 
although she saw me with my great looped-up riding 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 283 


skirt on and my whip in my hand, she never said a 
word nor lifted an eyebrow; just went on wetting 
her fingers and pushing the gloves down on them as 
though I was ready with my best hat on. That 
scared me worse than ever. I tore into my room, 
slipped off my skirt, put on another right over my 
riding trousers, slammed on a hat, threw a long cape 
around me, and grabbed my gloves. As the last bell 
began to ring and grandmother stepped out of the 
house, I stepped out beside her, all right as to the 
outer layer, but with the perspiration streaming down 
my face. I’d hurried so, and those great thick riding 
trousers were so hot under my woolen skirt! My! 
I thought I’d die! And it was worse in the church! 
Over in our dark, close corner pew there wasn’t a 
breath of air. It must have been a hundred by the 
thermometer. I was so hot I just had to do some- 
thing or die! There weren’t but a few people in the 
church, and nobody anywhere near our corner, and 
it was as dark as could be, back in our high pew. So 
when we knelt down for the General Confession I 
gathered the cape all around me, reached up under 
my full skirt, unbuttoned those awful riding trousers, 
and just cautiously slipped them off. My! What 
a relief it was! Grandmother felt me rustling around 
and looked over sharp at me, to see what I was 


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doing. When she saw the riding trousers, she looked 
shocked, and frowned; but I guess I must have 
looked terribly hot and red, so she didn’t say any- 
thing. 

“Well, I knew it was an awful thing to do in 
church, and I was so afraid maybe somebody had 
seen me, although old Dr. Skinner, the rector, was 
the only one high enough up to look over the pew- 
top, and he was looking at his Prayer Book. But I 
felt as mean as though he’d been looking right at 
me. Well, he finally got through the prayers and 
began on the First Lesson. It was something out 
of the Old Testament, that part about how the Jews 
went back and repaired the broken walls of Jerusa- 
lem, each one taking a broken place for his special 
job, and then how they got scared away, all but a 
few, from the holes in the walls they were trying to 
fix up. Dr. Skinner always read the Lessons very 
loud and solemn, as though he were reading them 
right at somebody, and he’d sort of turn from one 
to another in the congregation with his forefinger 
pointed at them, as if he meant that just for them. 
What do you suppose I felt like when he turned 
right towards our corner and leaned ’way over and 
shook his finger at me, and said in a loud, blaming 
tone, ‘But Asher continued and abode in his 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 285 


breaches!’ I gave a little gasp, and grandmother 
turned towards me quick. When she saw the ex- 
pression on my face (I guess I must have looked 
funny), she just burst right out into that great 
laugh of hers—ha! ha! ha! She laughed so she 
couldn’t stop, and had to actually get up and go 
out of church, her handkerchief stuffed into her 
mouth. We could hear her laughing as she went 
down the walk outside! 

“You’d have thought she’d be mortified, wouldn’t 
you? J was mortified almost to death! But she 
wasn’t a bit. She laughed every time she thought 
of it, for years after that. It was just like her! She 
did love a good laugh! Let anything happen that 
struck her as funny, and she’d laugh, no matter 
what!” 

Later on, as we carried the hassocks back to the 
church and put them in our pew, my aunt said, re- 
flectively, looking round the empty church: “TI never 
come in here that I don’t remember how grand- 
mother used to say the Creed, loud and strong— 
she always spoke up so clear: ‘From thence he shall 
‘come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in 
the Holy Ghost: The Holy Catholic Church: The 
Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins—’ 
and then she’d stop dead, while everybody went on, 


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‘The Resurrection of the body;’ and then she’d 
chime in again, ‘And the Life everlasting, Amen.’ 
You couldn’t help noticing it, she took the greatest 
pains you should. But if anybody said anything 
about it she always said that she didn’t believe in 
the resurrection of the body, and she wasn’t going to 
say she did. Sometimes the ministers would get 
wrought up, especially the young ones, and one of 
them went to the bishop about it, but nobody ever 
did anything. What could you do? And grand- 
mother went right on saying the Creed that way to 
the day of her death.” 


On the hundredth anniversary of the organization 
of our parish there were, of course, great doings in 
the way of centenary celebrations. Many of the old 
rectors came back to visit, and to make after-dinner 
talks and to preach at special services. One of the 
most interesting of these old men was the Reverend 
Mr. Jason Gillett, who had been rector for a year 
shortly after the Civil War, when he was a young 
man just out of the Theological Seminary. He had 
since become well-known, one might say famous (in 
church circles at least) for his sermons of a fervor 
truly evangelical (so it was said), delivered in a 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 287 


voice noted for its harmony and moving qualities. 
We had often read about his preaching, in the 
Church papers. He had brought up from decay 
several old parishes and had founded one of the 
finest and most thriving in Chicago. 

There was a stir when his return for a day was 
announced, and the morning when he preached, the 
church was crowded to the doors. He proved to be 
a spiritual-faced, white-haired, handsome old man, 
equipped with fine eyes and beautiful hands as well 
as his famous voice. He preached a sermon which 
held every one in the church breathlessly attentive. 
I noticed that his stole was exquisitely worked in 
gold thread, and after the service, when the Altar 
Guild were putting things away, we saw that his 
surplice was of extremely fine material, with a deep 
band of embroidery about the hem. “Loving lady- 
parishioners,” conjectured one of the Guild, hold- 
ing it up. 

“They say the women are always crazy about him, 
everywhere, and no wonder!” said another. ‘Such 
a fascinating, attractive personality.” 

“How did you like his sermon?” I asked. Per- 
sonally I had found it rather too dramatic for my 
taste. It rubs me the wrong way when I feel that 


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somebody is trying to work my feelings up, although 
I always feel a little ashamed of this natural un- 
graciousness, which is labeled in the talk of the old 
people of our locality as “Canfield cussedness.” 

One of my companions answered me, “Why, the 
tears ran right down my cheeks, towards the end of 
that sermon!” 

And another added, “Such a power for good as 
he has been, all his life. Think of his having begun 
his wonderful work right here in our little parish.” 

The door opened and the preacher himself en- 
tered in his black cassock, followed by a group of 
people. He was a little flushed from the hand- 
shaking reception he had been holding in the vesti- 
bule and still wore the affable smile which had gone 
with the handshaking. The men and women who 
had followed him in were still talking two or three 
at once, trying to get his attention, still fixing their 
eyes on him, unwilling to leave him, moved evidently 
by his mere presence. 

“Tt’s a renewal of my youth to be here again in 
this dear old parish,” he said genially, using a set 
of inflections of his fine voice quite different from 
those of the sermon, “I find it all comes back to me 
with the utmost freshness. Ah, youth! Youth!” 

He broke off to say in still another tone, “I know 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 289 


none of you will object to my saying also that it is 
an immense relief to find the parish rid of that de- 
testable incubus Mrs. Almera Canfield. You must 
all breathe a happier air, since she took her mock- 
ing cynicism into another world.” 

A quick shifting of eyes, lifted eyebrows, and sup- 
pressed smiles told him that he had been indiscreet. 
He faced the uncomfortable little situation with a 
well-oiled ease of manner. “Have I offended some 
one here?” he asked, instantly, turning towards us. 
Then, seeing by my expression that I was the one 
involved, he said gallantly, “It’s not possible that 
so very young a lady can have any connection with 
a generation so long since passed away.” 

“Mrs. Almera Canfield was my great-grand- 
mother,” I said, perhaps rather drily. Not that I 
cared especially about Great-grandmother, of whom 
at that time I knew very little, and who seemed as 
remote from my life as Moses. But that same hate- 
ful, contrary streak in my nature was roused to re- 
sentment by his apparent assumption that a smile and 
a word from him could set anything straight. 

He found the fact of my relationship and of my 
knowledge of it very amusing, ‘“‘Where, oh, where, 
out of Vermont could you find a modern young 
person who even knew the name of her great-grand- 


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mother? I’m sure, my dear, that family loyalties 
are outlawed by such a long interval of years. And 
I’m also sure by one look at you, that you are not 
at all like your great-grandmother.” 

He seemed to think, I reflected, that I would be 
sure to take that as a compliment. She must have 
been an old Tartar. 

I could think of nothing to answer, and he turned 
away again, to go on chatting with the people who 
continued to hang on his words, laughing loudly 
when he said something playful, nodding a grave 
concurrence in his more seriously expressed opin- 
lions, their eyes always fixed on his. 

They all moved away, out into the church and 
down the aisle and I did not see him again till that 
evening, when, quite unexpectedly, he appeared be- 
side me in the break-up of the company after the 
large public dinner. 

“T feel that I owe you an anulonwee he began per- 
suasively and courteously, “for having let slip that 
chance remark about a relative of yours, even so 
very far distant. I would not have said it, of course, 
if I had dreamed that any member of her family . . .” 
Up to this point he had used the same sort of voice 
and tone that he had employed after church that 
morning, but now he suddenly dropped into another 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 291 


tone, quite different. I had a divination that it was 
not only quite different from any inflection he had 
used, but also not at all what he had had the inten- 
tion of using. “I try to be fair . . . to be tolerant 
. . . to be forgiving, but really I can never forget 
the . . .” (it was as if a wave of lava had burst up 
out of the smiling pleasantness of his agreeable 
manner) “I simply can’t express to you the blight- 
ing, devastating effect she had on me, young, sensi- 
tive, emotional and ardent as I was at that time!” 

He started at the violence of his own voice and 
glanced quickly around him as if to see whether any 
one else had heard it. And then he looked intensely 
annoyed by his own gesture. 

“You are probably assuming that I refer,” he 
went on more quietly, but still pressingly (it was as 
if for some reason he quite cared to influence my 
unimportant opinion), “that I refer to her dictatorial 
assurance that she knew better than any one else 
how things ought to be run. Of course you must 
have heard plenty of stories of her overbearing ways. 
But that is not the point; no, although she was a 
hard parishioner on that account for a young clergy- 
man struggling with the administration of his first 
parish. What came back to me, in a wave of bitter- 
ness as I stood up to preach to-day, was the re- 


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membrance of the peculiarly corrosive vein of irony, 
with which she withered and dried to the root any 
play of poetry or emotion in those about her. So 
far from feeling any natural, human sympathy with 
ardent youth, she had a cold intolerance for any 
nature richer or more warmly colored than her own. 
She made it her business to drop an acid sneer upon 
any expression of emotion or any appeal to it; and a 
life-long practice in that diabolical art had given her 
a technique of raw, brutal roughness, guaranteed to 
hamstring any spontaneity of feeling, any warmth of 
personality. I could quote you dozens of such 
poisoned shafts of hers. . . . Here’s one that came 
into my mind as I stood again in that pulpit, where 
I first dedicated myself to the service of God. 

“T can never forget her comment on the first ser- 
mon in which I let myself go into the fervor which 
was given me by nature. It was an appeal for 
foreign missions, a cause always dear to my heart. 
I was carried away by my feelings, and fairly poured 
out my soul to my listeners. I have always con- 
sidered that to be my first real sermon, the first time 
I felt sure of my Vocation. Afterwards, as I stood 
in the robing room, faint with the reaction after my 
emotion, I heard some one just outside the door say, 
‘Well, Aunt Almera, what did you think of the 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 293 


sermon?’ And what do you think her answer was! 
She said, ‘Oh, I like to see anybody enjoy himself 
as much as that young man did.’ ” 

This unexpected conclusion brought to me such 
a sudden horrifying desire to laugh that I felt quite 
shaken by the necessity to curb it. And it was es- 
sential not to let it be seen. For he had wound him- 
self up again to a heat which astonished me. It 
was as if he had meant casually to show me an old 
scar, and had found to his surprise that the wound 
was as raw and smarting as ever. 

“Why,” he cried, “‘she all but drove me wholly out 
of preaching, at the very outset of my career, sit- 
ting there as she did, Sunday after Sunday, fixing 
that cynical aged eye on me. Youcan’t know... 
I hear that you have been brought up, luckily for 
you, outside of this deadly New England atmos- 
phere. ... You can’t imagine how it kills and 
freezes all the warmth and color and fire out of life 
to have such a... if I hadn’t escaped out of it 
Sivas. 

“T’m afraid I’ve been brought up mostly in a New 
England atmosphere,” I said, beginning to feel very 
cross and prickly. 

As if struck by something in my tone, he now 
looked at me very hard. I don’t know what he saw 


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in my face... perhaps a family resemblance of 
expression . . . but he suddenly seemed to come to 
himself with a start. He said abruptly, with an ex- 
pression of extreme annoyance once more on his 
face, “I beg your pardon for bringing all this up. I 
can’t think what in the world made me!” and turned 
away with a noticeable lack of suavity and grace of 
manner. 


Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who 
had come from Ireland as a young girl, just after the 
great famine in ’48, and had gone to work for Great- 
grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. 
She told me this story, in her thick, thick early-nine- 
teenth-century brogue, which I will not try to re- 
produce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and 
happy-looking, that lived up the road with her 
father, a poor weak rag of a man with a backbone 
like a piece of string. He’d married for his second 
wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found 
out the girl was in trouble, and her sweetheart that 
was the cause of it off up in the North Country for 
the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the step- 
mother turn the poor girl out—yes, out like a dog. 
And old Mrs. Canfield—that was some kin to you, 
I forget what—where I was working, she went right 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 295 


out and brought her in, and kept her there safe and 
sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, 
letting her sew to pay for her keep, and helping her 
make the baby clothes. She’d go with her to church 
every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody 
daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s 
tongue, ‘For,’ she used to say, ‘let em say a word 
if they dare, and IJ’ll tell a few things I know about 
some folks in this town who had to be married in a 
hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead 
of time.’ You see, she was so old she knew every- 
thing that had happened from the beginning al- 
most. She’d say, “There’s lots worse things done 
every day in this town than anything Margaret’s 
done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer her back a 
word. 

“But everybody was thinking it very certain 
that the man would never come back, and if he did, 
he’d never own the child, nor have anything to do 
with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days 
there weren’t any mails that were carried ’way back 
off in the woods, and she neither had any word of 
him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew 
what people were saying all right, and I could see 
that she was troubled in her mind, though she never 
lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s time 


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drew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was 
away. But Margaret never lost her faith in him a 
minute. ‘When John is back,’ she’d say, just as sure 
of him as though they’d been married by the priest; 
but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when 
she’d hear Margaret talking that way. 

“And then one morning, in April ’twas, and we’d 
all the doors and windows open for the first time, 
Margaret had gone down the walk to look at the 
lilac bush to see if there were any buds on it, and 
around the corner came John Dawson! 

“Her back was to him and he hadn’t any idea she 
was there, so when she turned round, they stared at 
each other for just a minute, as if they’d never seen 
each other. Now the moment had come, Margaret 
stood there frozen, just waiting, like a little scared, 
helpless—I had the half of me hanging out the 
kitchen window to see what would happen, and Ill 
never forget it—never—never—never—the look on 
his face, the astounded look on his face, so full of 
pity and love, so strong with pity and love. ‘Margie! 
Margie!’ he said in a loud voice, and threw his sack 
off his back and his gun from his hand, and ran, ran 
to take her in his arms. 

“Well, when I could see again, I went off to tell 
old Mrs. Canfield, and there was the old lady in her 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 297 


own bedroom, standing bolt upright in the middle of 
the floor, and crying at the top of her voice. Her 
wrinkled old face was just a-sop with tears. Faith, 
but it was the grand cry she was having! And the 
good it did her! When she came to, she says to me, 
‘Well,’ says she, ‘folks aren’t so cussed as they seem, 
are they?’ 

“And then we went downstairs to get out the 
fruit-cake and the brandied peaches; for the minis- 
ter married them in our parlor that afternoon.” 


One day old Mr. Morgan, the one-armed Civil 
War veteran, took me along with him, to get out of 
the buckboard and open gates, on the back road 
along the river. He was going up to a hill pasture 
to salt his sheep. It took forever to get there, be- 
cause his horse was so slow, and he had time to tell 
me a great many stories. This was one of them: 
“When I was a boy at school, I worked at Aunt Al- 
mera Canfield’s doing chores night and morning. 
I remember how she used to loosen herself up in the 
morning. She was terribly rheumaticky, but she 
wouldn’t give in to it. Every morning she’d be all 
stiffened up so she couldn’t stand up straight, nor 
hardly move her legs at all; but she’d get herself 
dressed somehow, and then two of her sons came in 


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to help her get started. She’d make them take hold 
of her, one on each side, and walk her around the 
room. It was awful to hear how she’d yell out—yell 
as though they were killing her! And then they’d 
stop, the sweat on their faces to see how it hurt her, 
and then she’d yell at them to go on, go on, she 
hadn’t asked them to stop! They were over sixty, 
both of them, with grandchildren themselves, but 
they didn’t dare not do what she said, and they’d 
walk her round again. She’d kick her poor legs out 
in front of her hard, to get the joints limbered up, 
and holler with the pain, and kick them out again, 
till by and by she’d get so she could go by herself, 
and she’d be all right for the day. I tell you, I often 
think of that. Yes, lots of times, it comes back to 
me.” 

Up in the sheep pasture, as we sat to rest the 
horse, he told me this: “I always thought Aunt Al- 
mera knew all about the John Brown raid before 
most folks did—maybe she sent some money to help 
him. She wasn’t a bit surprised, anyhow, when she 
heard of it, and all through the whole business she 
never thought of another thing, nor let anybody else. 
He was caught—any of us that lived in that house 
those days will never forget a one of those dates— 
and put in jail on the 9th of October, and his trial 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 299 


lasted until the 31st. Aunt Almera made us get to- 
gether in the evenings, me and the hired girl and one 
of her grandsons and her daughter, all the family, 
and she’d read aloud to us out of the ‘Tribune’ about 
what had happened that day at his trial. I never 
saw her so worked up about anything—just like 
ashes her old face was, and her voice like cold steel. 
We got as excited about it as she did, all of us, es- 
pecially her grandson, that was about my age. The 
day of his execution—December 2d, it was—Aunt 
Almera came at dawn to wake me up. ‘Put on your 
clothes,’ says she, ‘and go over to the church and 
begin to toll the bell.’ I didn’t need to ask her what 
for, either. Ill never forget how awful she looked 
to me. 

“Well, we tolled the bell all day long, one or the 
other of the family, never stopped a minute. You 
never heard anything so like death. All day long 
that slow, deep clang—and then a stillness—and 
then clang! again. I could hear it in my head for 
days afterwards. Folks came in from all around to 
find out what it meant, and Aunt Almera called them 
all into her parlor—she sat there all day and never 
ate a mouthful of food—and fold them what it 
meant, so they couldn’t ever get the sound of her 
voice out of their ears. Between times she’d read 


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out of the Bible to whoever was there, ‘Avenge thou 
thy cause, O Lord God of battles,’ and ‘It is time 
for thee, O Lord, to lay to thy hand, for they have 
destroyed thy law,’ and ‘Let there be no man to pity 
them; nor to have compassion of their fatherless 
children.’ It was the darndest thing to hear her! 

“You’d better believe when Abraham Lincoln sent 
out the first call for men there wasn’t a boy of mili- 
tary age in our town that didn’t enlist!” 


An aged cousin had just died, and as we sat 
downstairs talking with the doctor, he said to my 
aunt, who had been taking care of the sick woman: 
“She took it hard! She took it hard!” 

They both frowned, and my aunt looked rather 
sick. ‘Then the doctor said, ‘““Not much like your 
grandmother, do you remember?” 

“Oh, yes, I remember,” said my aunt, her face 
quivering, her eyes misty, her lips smiling. 

The doctor explained to me: “Your great-grand- 
mother was an old, old woman before she ever was 
really sick at all, except for rheumatism. And then 
she had a stroke of paralysis that left her right side 
dead. She lived four days that way—the only days 
she’d spent in bed in years, since she was a young 


ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 301 


woman, I suppose. Her mind wasn’t very clear, she 
couldn’t talk so that we could understand her, and I 
don’t think she rightly knew anybody after her 
stroke. I guess she went back, ’way back, for we 
saw from what she did that she thought she had a 
little baby with her. I suppose she thought she was 
a young mother again, and that was why she was in 
bed. We used to see her spread out her arm, very 
gentle and slow, the only arm she could move, so’s to 
make a hollow place for a little head, and then she’d 
lie there, so satisfied and peaceful, looking up at the 
ceiling with a smile in her eyes, as if she felt a little 
warm, breathing creature there beside her. And 
sometimes she’d half wake up and stretch out her 
hand and seem to stroke the baby’s head or snuggle 
it up closer to her, and then she’d give a long sigh 
of comfort to find it there, and drop off to sleep 
again, smiling. And she’d always remember, even in 
her sleep, to keep her arm curved around so there’d 
be room for the baby; and even in her sleep her face 
had that shining new-mother look—that old wrin- 
kled face, with that look on it! I’ve seen lots of 
death-beds, but I never—” he stopped for a moment. 

“Why, at the very last—do you remember?”—he 
went on to my aunt, “I thought she was asleep, but 


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as I moved a chair she opened her eyes quickly, 
looked down as if to see whether I had wakened the 
baby, and looked at me, to warn me to be quiet, her 
fingers at her lips. ‘Sh!’ she whispered. 

“And that was the way she died.” 






















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